Jawaharlal Nehru wrote in The Discovery of India that “among the many people and races who have come in contact with Indians and influenced India’s life and culture, the oldest and most persistent have been the Iranians.” It is the kind of historical fact readily verified by ordinary experience. My grandfather was more fluent in Persian than in any other language; I grew up using Persian words in everyday conversations, eating food that originated in Persia, and listening to music whose most widespread and enduring forms—qawwali and the ghazal—were refined by a medieval poet in Persian.

For nearly a millennium, Persian was the lingua franca of Asia: the language widely used by political and intellectual mandarins and necessary, too, for travelers such as Marco Polo and Ibn Battuta, who both deployed the language in China. Indeed, if Persian nationalism has maintained a profound sense of historical continuity transcending many different political regimes, it is because of its roots in the achievements of an expansive and long-lasting Persian civilization, or ecumene. Translated into many vernacular languages, the poetry and philosophy of Firdausi, Attar, Rumi, Hafez, Sa‘di, Nizami, Ibn Sina, and Nizam al-Mulk assumed a canonical authority across Asia. Rulers everywhere, whether Muslim, Hindu, or Buddhist, adopted Persian ideologies of statecraft that, as Richard Eaton writes in India in the Persianate Age: 1000–1765 (2019), privileged “the notion of justice and connecting economy, morality and politics.”

The flow of ideas and ideologies came even faster in response to the shocks and traumas of the West’s violent domination of Asia in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Visiting Iran in 1932, Rabindranath Tagore, who grew up listening to his father recite Hafez, enlisted in the country’s attempt to create a national identity based on its pre-Islamic and pan-Asian heritage. The modernist writer Sadegh Hedayat published The Blind Owl, a masterpiece of Iranian literature, in Mumbai (then Bombay) in 1936. The thinker and poet Muhammad Iqbal, an eloquent writer in Persian like many in his Indian generation, was a major influence on Iranian Islamists, including Ali Khamenei, who coauthored a book on him; the anticolonial struggle of Gandhi inspired Mohammed Mossadegh, the first elected prime minister of Iran.

These shared, often coordinated, responses to the existential challenge of Western power defined what it meant to be an Indian or Iranian in the modern world; they clarified what the ideals and interests of a society free from the Western masters of the universe would be. Yet there were always differing visions for realizing these ideals, ranging from political sovereignty to social justice, and national trajectories could diverge widely. Living in India, I felt no esteem for either the venal Shah of Iran or Iran’s revolutionary regime, which, intolerant of political dissent and women’s rights from the start, became more tyrannical during Iran’s ferocious long war with Saddam Hussein, then the West’s proxy.

At the same time, my intimate awareness of the many challenges, setbacks, and disasters of postcolonial nation building during the cold war precluded the reflexive Western attitude toward Iran of fear and loathing underpinned by near-total ignorance. In time, I made my own pilgrimage to the tomb of Hafez in Shiraz. Traveling around Iran, I became a beneficiary of the Persian world’s noblest tradition: warmhearted hospitality. Perhaps this explains the desolation and shame I felt when I read about the American torpedoing of the IRIS Dena, an Iranian vessel that thought itself safe in international waters, as it was returning from an international naval exercise at the East Indian port of Visakhapatnam.

A few days before the unleashing of Operation Epic Fury, the men on board this ship had been feted on Indian streets. They had visited the Taj Mahal and taken selfies with curious spectators. Yet neither their “silent death,” in Pete Hegseth’s gloating description, death by a 3,700-pound American missile in the Indian Ocean, where the present Indian government claims to provide “net security,” nor the violation of international law that requires belligerents to help sailors wounded in battle merited an official protest at the US embassy in New Delhi. The Indian Navy’s statement failed even to mention the attack—an act of “fun,” as Trump described it to a Republican gathering this Monday, to much laughter—that sank the vessel. Nor did it express regret at the deaths of nearly a hundred unarmed sailors.

I read that civilians in Sri Lanka, whose navy recovered some of the bodies of the drowned sailors, had donated money to a refrigerated storage unit that could keep them until their repatriation to Iran. I kept scanning the Indian and international press in futile search for some thought or emotion that matched this atrocity or, however inadvertently, mourned the silent death of what Tagore hailed as “Indo-Iranian civilization.” Perhaps I was looking in the wrong places. Too much of mainstream journalism today has been debased and coarsened by its incessant lying or equivocating about Israel’s live-streamed abominations in Palestine. Unsurprisingly, reporters, broadcasters, and columnists display an impeccable sangfroid before not only the chemical incineration of Tehran but also the “double tap” execution of nearly two hundred Iranian schoolgirls.

But it is not enough to recoil from the moral squalor of many “legacy” institutions. Far more precious legacies are being squandered today. It is our destiny to witness not only “fun” spectacles of “Death, Fire, and Fury” mounted by leaders of the free world working closely together with their genocidal protégé in the Middle East. We confront, too, the death of a once potent imagination.

For more than a century, the political and moral imagination in much of the Persian ecumene was shaped by an urgent quest for alternatives to the pitilessly exploitative regimes of capitalist imperialism. For Gandhi, a historical experience that began in the late nineteenth century in South Africa made him see fascism and imperialism as inevitable features of capitalist states overdependent on violence—disguised and softened at home, extreme and explicit abroad. It was the fate of a later observer like Jalal Al-e-Ahmad, the twentieth-century novelist and essayist, to endure, while still analyzing, the insidiousness of neoimperialism: economic modernization under Western auspices that condemned postcolonial states to perpetual underdevelopment.

During this bitter education in the making of the modern world, both Gandhi and Al-e-Ahmad became alert to how the pursuit of wealth and power could plunge people of non-Western origins into intellectual and spiritual as well as geopolitical subservience to the West. Faced with its full, grotesque embodiment at home—the Shah of Iran with his Pharaonic fantasy of top-down modernization and secret police trained to torture by the CIA—Al-e-Ahmad defined, more precisely than other Asian thinkers, this pathology: gharbzadegi (“Westoxification,” or more literally “West-struckness,” which connotes both bewitchment and sickness). It was the affliction of a people, he wrote, who have “no supporting traditions, no historical continuity, no gradient of transformation.”

Today this lightness of historical being stultifies the American and European citizens of Iranian origin who hope to be delivered regime change on a plate by an authentic axis of evil: a stalwart member of the Epstein class, an internationally wanted exponent of genocide, and the buffoonish son of Iran’s disgraced former potentate. More terrifyingly, India displays, at the highest levels of policymaking, a lack of supporting traditions and historical memory.

The personal choices of a Hindu supremacist prime minister—Narendra Modi visited Israel just two days before its assault on Iran to express his bonhomie with Bibi, and to receive a medal as illustriousas the FIFA Peace Prize—are only partly to blame. The principled opposition to racism and imperialism that once made India the moral leader of Asia went missing well before Modi and his toadies emerged with their WhatsApp forwards to deride the ideals of Gandhi and Nehru. This rupture in historical memory is more startling, and seems more devastating, when you consider how much the “century of humiliation” motivates the Chinese leaders working on the gradient of national transformation at the farthest end of the Persian ecumene.

“Rising” Indians and well-heeled Iranians of an Americanizing global class assumed that American ideals of economic, intellectual, and political freedom would triumph; they convinced themselves that their personal flourishing depended on diligent concord with the global hegemon. Such delusions mattered less when the political actors and intellectual publicists of Western supremacism still wore the mask of liberalism, and claimed to preside over a benign globalization that would lift all boats.

Marco Rubio’s encomiums to white Western civilization, and Hegseth’s pornographic fantasies of “death and destruction from the sky all day long,” proclaim today a sadistic urge to re-impose the racial hierarchies of the nineteenth century. It is in this old-new world that the once undisputed leader of the non-Western world is reduced to a bit player; exposed now to routine bullying by Trump, it is unable to mourn, let alone protest, the murder of its Iranian guests. The violent historical drama of Western supremacism in its frenzied final acts will have many more casualties, but few will be as destitute, or provoke as much horror and pity, as the victims of West-struckness, of gharbzadegi.