Dharma and the Religious Other in Hindi Popular Cinema

Introduction Ruth Roach Pierson Chapter One Maori Agriculturalists and Aboriginal Hunter-Gatherers: Women and Colonial Displacement in Nineteenth-Century Aotearoa/New Zealand and Southeastern Australia Patricia Grimshaw Chapter Two Enfranchising Women of Color: Suffragists as Agents of Imperialism Rosalyn Terborg-Penn Chapter Three Gendered Colonialism: The Woman Question in Settler Society Dolores E. Janiewski Chapter Four Actions Louder than Words: The Historical Task of Defining Feminist Consciousness in Colonial West Africa Cheryl Johnson-Odim Chapter Five Frontier Feminism and the Marauding White Man: Australia, 1890s to 1940s Marilyn Lake Chapter Six The Porfiriato and the Mexican Revolution: Constructions of Feminism and Nationalism Gabriela Cano Chapter Seven The Politics of Irish Identity and the Interconnections between Feminism, Nationhood and Colonialism Breda Gray and Louise Ryan Chapter Eight Cohabiting and Conflicting Identities: Women and Nationalisms in Twentieth-Century Iran Joanna de Groot Chapter Nine Orthodoxy, Cultural Nationalism and Hindutva Violence: An Overview of the Gender Ideology of the Hindu Right Tanika Sarkar Chapter Ten Surviving Absence: Jewishness and Femininity in Liberation France, 1944-45 Karen Adler Chapter Eleven Men, Women and the Community Borders: German-Nationalist and National Socialist Discourses on Gender, and National Identity in Austria, 1918-1938 Johanna Gehmacher Chapter Twelve Images of Sara Bartman: Sexuality, Race and Gender in Early Nineteenth-Century Britain Yvette Abrahams Chapter Thirteen Sexual and Racial Discrimination: An Historical Inquiry into the Japanese Military's Comfort Women System of Enforced Prostitution Sayoko Yoneda Chapter Fourteen Vacations in the Contact Zone: Race, Gender and the Traveller at Niagara Falls Karen Dubinsky Chapter Fifteen Uprooted Women: Partition of Punjab, 1947 Aparna Basu Chapter Sixteen Politics and the Writing of History Himani Bannerji Gabriela Cano Chapter Seven The Politics of Irish Identity and the Interconnections between Feminism, Nationhood and Colonialism Breda Gray and Louise Ryan Chapter Eight Cohabiting and Conflicting Identities: Women and Nationalisms in Twentieth-Century Iran Joanna de Groot Chapter Nine Orthodoxy, Cultural Nationalism and Hindutva Violence: An Overview of the Gender Ideology of the Hindu Right Tanika Sarkar Chapter Ten Surviving Absence: Jewishness and Femininity in Liberation France, 1944-45 Karen Adler Chapter Eleven Men, Women and the Community Borders: German-Nationalist and National Socialist Discourses on Gender, and National Identity in Austria, 1918-1938 Johanna Gehmacher Chapter Twelve Images of Sara Bartman: Sexuality, Race and Gender in Early Nineteenth-Century Britain Yvette Abrahams Chapter Thirteen Sexual and Racial Discrimination: An Historical Inquiry into the Japanese Military's Comfort Women System of Enforced Prostitution Sayoko Yoneda Chapter Fourteen Vacations in the Contact Zone: Race, Gender and the Traveller at Niagara Falls Karen Dubinsky Chapter Fifteen Uprooted Women: Partition of Punjab, 1947 Aparna Basu Chapter Sixteen Politics and the Writing of History Himani Bannerji

Legacies of Colonial History: Region, Religion and Violence in Postcolonial Gujarat Yogesh Chandrani This dissertation takes the routine marginalization and erasure of Muslim presence in the contemporary social and political life of the western Indian state of Gujarat as an entry point into a genealogy of Gujarati regionalism. Through a historical anthropology of the reconfiguration of the modern idea of Gujarat, I argue that violence against religious minorities is an effect of both secular nation-building and of religious nationalist mobilization. Given this entanglement, I suggest that we rethink the oppositional relationship between religion and the secular in analyzing violence against Muslims in contemporary Gujarat. The modern idea of Gujarat, I further argue, cannot be grasped without taking into consideration how local conceptions of region and of religion were fundamentally altered by colonial power. In particular, I suggest that the construction of Islam as inessential and external to the idea of Gujarat is a legacy bequeathed by colonialism and its forms of knowledge. The transmutation of Gujarati Muslims into strangers, in other words, occurred simultaneously with the articulation of the modern idea of Gujarat in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I focus in particular on the role of nineteenth-century regional history-writing, in which the foundational role of Islam was de-emphasized, in what I call the making of a regional tradition. By highlighting the colonial genealogy of contemporary discourses of Gujaratni asmita (pride in Gujarat), in which Hindu and Gujarati are posited as identical with each other, I argue that colonialism was one of its conditions of possibility. One result of this simultaneous reconfiguration of religion and region, I argue, is that it is becoming increasingly difficult to inhabit a Hindu religious identity that is not at the same time articulated in opposition to a Muslim Other in Gujarat. Another consequence is that it is becoming increasingly difficult, if not impossible, for Muslims to represent themselves or advocate for their rights as Muslim and as Gujarati. How the reconfiguration of a Gujarati regional identity is imbricated with transformations in conceptions of religion is part of what this dissertation seeks to think about. Furthermore, I argue that the marginalization of Muslims in Gujarat cannot be understood through an exclusive focus on organized violence or on the Hindu nationalist movement. While recent studies on Gujarat have focused mainly on the pogrom of 2002 to think about the role of the Hindu nationalist movement in orchestrating mass violence against Muslims in contemporary Gujarat, I argue that the pogrom of 2002 is but one part of a broader spectrum of violence and exclusion that permeates the body of the state and society. In addition, I suggest that one of the conditions of possibility for such violence is the sedimentation of a conception of Gujaratiness as identical with Hinduness that cuts across the religious/secular divide. Instead of focusing exclusively on the violence of the Hindu nationalist movement, I explore this process of sedimentation as it manifests itself in the intersecting logics of urban planning, heritage preservation, and neoliberal development in contemporary Gujarat. Through an analysis of the contemporary reorganization and partitioning of the city of Ahmedabad along religious lines, I show how it is continuous with colonial and nationalist urban planning practices of the early twentieth century. Using ethnographic examples, I also argue that the contemporary secular nationalist discourse of heritage preservation is both complicit in the marginalization of Muslims and continuous with practices of urban planning and preservation that were articulated in the late colonial period. Finally, my dissertation demonstrates the enabling nature of neoliberal logics in the organization of violence against Muslims in Gujarat and argues that antiMuslim violence and prejudice are enabled by and intertwined with narratives about the promises of capital and progress. Combining historical and ethnographic methods, this dissertation seeks to contribute to an anthropology of colonialism, nationalism, religion, secularism and violence in South Asia that is attentive to the continuities and discontinuities that are constitutive of the postcolonial present we inhabit. By historicizing contemporary debates and assumptions about Muslims in Gujarat and describing some of the genealogies that have contributed to their sedimentation, I hope to have argued that colonial legacies have enduring effects in the present and that the question posed by colonial forms of knowledge and representation is not merely epistemological or historiographical but also a political one. Written as a history of the present, this dissertation is motivated by a desire to imagine a future in which Hindu/Gujarati and Muslim are no longer conceptualized as oppositional categories; in which Gujarati Muslims are able to represent themselves as Muslims and in their own (varied) terms; and where Hindus are no longer invited and incited to inhabit a subjectivity that depends on making Muslims strangers to Gujarat.

Entre as dinâmicas associadas a encontros interculturais, encontra-se a de (re-) elaboração de universos simbólicos por grupos sociais participantes de relações de alteridade. Em se tratando de relações de dominação imperial, entre os séculos 18 e 20, na Ásia, tal dinâmica envolveu a reinterpretação de universos simbólicos preexistentes, como os religiosos, bem como a criação de novos modos de organização simbólica da vida em sociedade, como as comunidades nacionais. Este artigo se concentra na análise da construção de um universo simbólico nacional-religioso em um contexto fortemente influenciado por relações de alteridade. Trata-se do discurso sobre a nação hindu e seu outro muçulmano, elaborado nas primeiras décadas do século 20, no subcontinente indiano, por um ideólogo nacionalista hindu, V. D. Savarkar. Adota-se como referencial teórico a fenomenologia, em sua vertente sociológica, e procede-se à análise do conteúdo da fonte primária Hindutva: Who is a Hindu? Argumenta-se que o ideólogo nacionalista hindu formulou uma retórica da aniquilação, em que o outro da nação hindu, o muçulmano, é inferiorizado por meio das estratégias de: exagero seletivo de características atribuídas ao muçulmano; transferência de definições socialmente negativas ao outro.

I analyze the most dramatic event of recent politics, the struggle for power between the secular nationalist Indian National Congress (INC) and the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party. The chapter deals with the history and nature of the nationalism in India, its relevance to classical models of nationalism, its recent development into secular and religious versions and their most recent political struggle. Indian nationalism is a mixture of intellectual anti-British struggles and a middle class patriotic movement. When it matured, it attained some characteristics of classical nationalism. Nationalism theory became linked with the theory of “imagined communities.” Indian patriots “imagined” an Indian nation, but other groups favored for a special identity and “imagined” the nation of Indian Muslims, Hindus, and Sikhs. At some point Hindu and Muslim Indian nationalists started considering each other as “alien,” which led to the rise of Muslim separatism, Sikh Separatism and Hindu Nationalism. The breakup of India in 1947 led to the creation of secular but Hindu-dominated India and Pakistan as the state of Indian Muslims. I conclude that the Indian struggle for independence led to the formation of India’s major political party of India, the INC. It remains the party of Indian secular nationalists and includes regional secular forces which joined to defeat Hindu nationalists. Despite tactical alliances with regional forces the Hindu nationalists have failed to regain the ruling status in 2004. In May 2014, however, Hindu Nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party won the Parliamentary elections and its leader Narendra Modi became new Prime-Minister of India. Thus the pendulum moved againg in favour of Hindu Nationalism.

This thesis examines the role of internet infrastructure and its associated discourses in processes of governmentality and subject formation in low and middle-income countries of the global South. Using data collected in the central Indian state of Chhattisgarh as its core case, it asks questions about the interrelationship between policy and political discourse, new information and communications infrastructure, private capital, and how citizens come to know and/or experience internet infrastructure in their everyday lives. Since 2014, The National Optical Fibre Network (NOFN, which began in 2011 under the then UPA government) has been reshaped and rebranded as part of ‘Digital India’ by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his far-right Hindutva Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Alongside the cables and connectivity, the BJP and allied Hindu extremist organisations have targeted minorities and women through mob violence and (on and offline) hate speech, while a small number of crony capitalist corporations have seen immense profits. Unpicking the links between these processes, the thesis argues that internet infrastructure has become crucial to expanding a particular unregulated brand of capitalism and to narrowing civic subjectivities. Infrastructures constellate and circulate material and symbolic goods in an institutionalised manner to produce collectivities. Using discourse analysis shows that since the late 1980s, in a context of increasing neoliberalism, internet infrastructure emerged within a discursive regime marked by the fetishisation of systems rationality, enumeration, scientism and economism to produce what can be called digital governmentality. Digital governmentality enables and reinforces a centralised Hindu nationalism mediated by digital technologies and networks. Using semi-structured interviews and participant observation in the city of Ambikapur, and close to 50 villages in Surguja district of Chhattisgarh, data chapters describe a wide range of ‘infrastructural practices.’ The analysis centres on how subjects imagine, frame and experience these practices. Dominant caste groups in Ambikapur seek to subvert governmentality in practice but also uphold and reproduce the rationalities that drive governmental authority – such as efficiency and transparency. Adivasis (indigenous groups) who reside in surrounding rural areas are subject to a political economic regime overdetermined by coal mining and destruction of their land, forests and water resources. Internet infrastructure is non-existent or broken, along with other missing infrastructural substrates such as electricity and water. Adivasis face infrastructural control as a specific mode of governmentality where power is exerted not from the top in directly coercive ways but rather through mundane infrastructural practices, thereby exerting authority in procedural ways. In other instances, Adivasis’ processes of subject formation are entangled with (the reality and promise of) internet infrastructure in complex ways – ranging from cruel optimism to social haunting. The thesis makes an original contribution to the emerging sub-field of infrastructure studies by providing a new way of studying communicative infrastructures involving: a renewed emphasis on relationality (infrastructures, governmentality and subjectivation as relational processes and practices); situating internet infrastructures within broader infrastructures; and a historical analysis of how infrastructure is caught up in exercise of power relations. With significant emphasis on the concerns and interests of indigenous peoples in India, the final chapters of the thesis also contribute to a decolonisation of media and communications as a field, and to avoiding orientalist essentialism.

Democracy and Nation Formation: National Identity Change and Dual Identity in Taiwan, 1991-2011 Shiau-Chi Shen As has been the case in many newly democratized countries, the transition to democracy in Taiwan entailed nationalist competition and the aggravation of ethnic conflict. Much research has shown that national identities among the general populace have experienced radical change. The Chinese national identity no longer occupies a dominant position, while the Taiwanese national identity is rapidly rising. The popular view is that democratization provides a political space for this nascent Taiwanese identity to challenge, and eventually replace, orthodox Chinese identity. This view, however, overlooks the very important phenomenon that, especially in the stage following the democratic transition, most people held dual national identity, i.e. both Taiwanese and Chinese national identities. This phenomenon presents a puzzle to the study of national identity in Taiwan, and in general as well. Why, in the fierce confrontation between two national identities in national politics, would most people prefer to see Taiwanese and Chinese national identities as compatible and show their allegiance to both? This dissertation challenges the assumption in previous research that the nature of national identity is exclusive—that it represents an either-or choice or attitude. This assumption has led to the incorrect view that the decline of Chinese national identity and the rise of Taiwanese national identity are two sides of the same coin. Contrary to this conventional view, this study shows that the trajectory of the two identities are actually different processes which have occurred during different historical stages and in different international environments, and that they are the results of different political forces. Taiwanese national identity started to rise in the early 1990’s. Chinese national identity, however, began to decline only after 2000. The past two decades thus witnessed a great proportion of people with dual identity. This study focuses on the factors of state and politics, rather than history and ethnicity, to explain the rise of Taiwanese national identity, and also the phenomenon of dual identity. It is contended that the ethnic base of Taiwanese national identity, with its particular history and language, which has been much emphasized by many political and cultural elites, as well as scholars, constitutes only one route of nation formation. The other more important route is through political participation in the democratic regime. While democratic institutions and practices redefine the de jure territory of the state (the Republic of China), democratic citizenship provides a new base for collective self-understanding. Through participation in democratic political processes, identification with the Taiwan-wide political community is cultivated among the populace. The Taiwanese national identity engendered through this route does not challenge the ethnicity upon which the Chinese national identity is based. It thus is able to co-exist with Chinese national identity. The decline of Chinese national identity is hence not the result of the rise of Taiwanese identity, but of the rise of China. It is argued that the dominance of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in the international community along with its staunch One China Principle has removed the important component of the Republic of China (ROC) from the Chinese national identity in Taiwan. Chinese unification now means the elimination of the ROC and to be ruled by the PRC. People who have identified with the ROC no longer opt for a unified great China and hence forgo their Chinese national identity. Based on the study of the phenomenon of dual identity in Taiwan, this dissertation proposes two important theoretical findings. First, contrary to the popular view among the students of nationalism and nationalist politics, it argues that democratization mitigates rather than exacerbates identity politics. Secondly, dual identity is difficult to sustain if the larger nation pursues a state that denies political autonomy to the small nation.

This thesis tries to answer two main questions in Indian economic reform and liberalization: the initiation and consolidation of the reform. Contrary to most of the prevailing explanations focusing on one level or one dimension, this thesis tries to analyze them in a more historical and broader framework, namely historical-structure and state-centered structure. Post-independent India has gone through three main periods: Indian Nationalism (1947-1964), Communalism (1964-1979), and Globalization (1980s onwards). Comprehending the causality between these three periods helps we better understand the roots of economic crisis in 1991. That is, the rise of Communalism led to the erosion of the state’s autonomy, so a certain kind of reform became a must. And the rise of Globalization gave neo-liberalist economic reform a preference. This thesis further argues that the antagonism between Secularism and Hindu Nationalism, the competition between India and China, and the transnational globalization consolidate the economic reform after 1991. These three main factors could be comprehended as a dialogue between Globalization and Hindutva. Therefore, through this thesis, we found that there were subtle relations between so-called “Identity Politics” and economic reform in Indian political economy.

?Communalism? is a term used in India, but invented by colonial rulers in the nineteenth century, to refer to the use and manipulation of religious and/or ethnic differences for ?political? ends antithetical to the national (or colonial) interest. It is related to, but very different from, the idea of ?community?. Arguably, the rise of ?communalism? was partly a reaction to the undermining of older, more local communities by rapid economic and social change. During the period of colonial occupation alternative outlets for popular unease and discontent included the Indian nationalist movement, but the division of this movement into Muslim, Hindu, Brahmin, non-Brahmin and other fractions, encouraged by the colonial power for strategic reasons, became a hall-mark of Indian politics and social life in the late colonial period. The secularist consensus established in the early years after Independence for a while promised a new future for India. However, during the past decade, the decline of secularism, the decline of the Congress Party, and the emergence of fundamentalist parties and organisations has made communalism once more a prominent feature of Indian life. Communalism has also spread beyond the subcontinent, the political conflicts within India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka increasingly being found mirrored amongst the substantial communities of Indians and Pakistanis living abroad. For historians the question of how the twentieth century?s conception of community and contemporary ideas of communalism came about is one of considerable controversy. However, among contemporary sociologists studying community or ?race relations? (as they used to be termed) in the United States, the Caribbean, Africa, the U.K. or Indian Ocean States it is often assumed that the identities of migrant communities are largely brought with them, and that they are based upon primordial and age-old forms of identity and conflict to be found in the Indian subcontinent. To put it simply, the fact that communalism is endemic in the Indian subcontinent today, means that it is considered an ?essential? feature of Indian society, and it?s appearance elsewhere is therefore regarded as unproblematic. The international activities of militant political and religious organisations such as the Vishwa Hindu Parishad or Jammia Islamia are likewise predicated upon this assumption, that the interests and identities of Hindus and Muslims everywhere are essentially the same. When looked at more closely however, and in comparative perspective, it soon becomes apparent that to ?be a Hindu? in Leicester, in England, for example, is very different from ?being a Hindu? in Durban South Africa, and that even within the subcontinent the identities of, for example, Muslims in Bombay, and those in Hyderabad, Lucknow or Bangladesh are very different from one another. This article questions some of the assumptions of fundamentalists and western sociologists. It attempts to explain the divergent historical circumstances that have led to the various outcomes in terms of community relations amongst migrant groups in Asia. The article also examines the origins and consequences of the widely varying identities that have emerged among migrant communities within South Asia, and amongst the many communities of South Asians scattered beyond the subcontinent in the former territories of Britain?s colonial empire.

The Goffal Speaks: Coloured Ideology and the Perpetuation of a Category in Post-Colonial Zimbabwe Kelly M. Nims Significant changes for the Coloured community have occurred and continue to occur as a result of an ever-changing political landscape in Zimbabwe. These changes reveal a group consciousness or ideology that often translates into daily practices of methods of inclusion and exclusion based on ethnic affiliation and racial organization. Many Coloureds have historically denied the reality of the boundaries that have separated them from whites or Europeans, and more recently, have reinforced the boundaries that have separated them from black Africans. Zimbabwe at Independence was the poster child for progress and change on the African continent. It was a place where, “the wrongs of the past [would] stand forgiven and forgotten... [and] oppression and racism were inequalities that [would] never find scope in the political and social system.” Yet thirty years later, amid growing disillusionment over promises of a unified Zimbabwe, a destitute economy, and the perpetuation of racial inequality and oppression, there is an effort among Coloureds themselves to reify the Coloured category. The categorization of people tends to develop in the course of specific histories of particular places. Local nuances color this. In Southern Africa, following the victory of the South African National Party (NP) in 1948, the term “community” was used as a euphemism for racial exclusion. Official categories that were clearly racial were commonly designated “communities”: the Indian community, the Coloured community, the white community, and the black community. The NP relied heavily on the idea on distinct peoples bound together by blood and 1 People who share a particular quality of relationship, such as a sense of common identity or consciousness. In this sense the mixed-race community. 2 A number of people or things that are located close together or are considered or classed together. 3 Robert Mugabe, President of Zimbabwe, inaugural speech, April 17, 1980. 4 Here meant to imply a legal definition of Colouredness; very similar to community but not quite the same. culture and in this context the language of community slid easily into a rhetoric justifying separate development for separate communities (Crehan, 2002). In the anti-apartheid era, opposition to the State often assumed the form of struggles fought out in the name of a particular community. It is here yet again, in the postcolonial context that we witness Coloured struggles around notions of belonging, nationality and citizenship. Why and how have Coloureds or mixed race people in Zimbabwe sought to reclaim, or perpetuate their historic place (category) within the colonial racial hierarchy postcolonially in an ever-changing political landscape? This dissertation examines the ideology of Coloured peoples and the perpetuation and maintenance of the category Coloured in post-colonial Zimbabwe. The framework used here is from a socio-historical perspective, considering the political history of colonial settler policy in Zimbabwe, its subsequent racial ideology, and its effects on the social reality of the Coloured or mixed race population today. Here the conceptualization of race is restricted to settler societies and is not meant to be addressed on a global scale, as the term Coloured in this sense is in and of itself a Southern African phenomenon. This study relies on ethnographic data collected intermittently for approximately twentytwo months between May 2004 and May 2008 in the Matabeleland region of Zimbabwe, in particular, in the city of Bulawayo. Additional ethnographic data was also collected in Cape Town, South Africa in the winter of 2009. Several methods were used in collecting data for this project: household surveys, genealogies, semi-structured and unstructured interviews, participant observation and snowball methodology. This study reveals the historical fluctuations in the meaning of the Coloured category and its overall genealogy to demonstrate that race was a paramount paradigm of identity in Rhodesia and despite changes in heads of state, ideologies, social practices and meanings that define identity, it continues to remain paramount in Zimbabwe today. Further, I argue that Coloureds themselves are major perpetuators of racial difference in the post-colonial context and value Coloured identity above either a national Zimbabwean identity or a continental African identity. The reason for this is that Coloureds hold on to the ideological value of their legal and social status of the past. By examining the Coloured experience within race and space in Bulawayo, this dissertation demonstrates how Coloureds maintain and enforce the familiar boundaries of their community in the post-colonial context via residential, social and cultural enclaves. Given the struggle for “place” in terms of nationalism—socially and economically in post-colonial Zimbabwe-that is revealed through a study of popular discourse on race and political change in Zimbabwe, one questions whether Coloureds could ever or would ever want to become African. 5 Ideas about being Coloured that constitute goals, expectations and actions.

This article assesses whether civil society promotes democratization, as has been argued implicitly or explicitly in the political discourse, following the publication of Putnam's Making Democracy Work. The theorists of “third-wave” transitology have advocated civil society as the indispensable instrument for the survival and sustenance of democracy. This article, however, argues that civil society is not necessarily a democratic force. It may or may not have positive implications in regard to democratization and the functioning of democracy. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in the tribal-dominated south Rajasthan, this article analyses the case of Rajasthan Vanvasi Kalyan Parishad (RVKP), a Hindu(tva)-oriented non-governmental organization (NGO), to demonstrate how civil society could also be anti-democratic. It shows that by utilizing development as a medium of entry, the RVKP has not only successfully presented itself as a counter-force against the “threatening others”, such as Muslims and Christians but also mobilized electoral support for the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). In return, the BJP-led state government has provided economic, political and legal support to the RVKP and facilitated the Hindutva politics at the grassroots level. The article concludes that in the context of Rajasthan, a conservative state has collaborated with an exclusivist civil society organization – the consequence of which has not just been the spread of violence and demonization of religious minorities but also a serious undermining of cultural pluralism and democratic values of Indian society.

In the fall of 2017, the Taj Mahal (Image 11.1) made international news once again. This time it was not due to pollution, or its sectarian registration as a Muslim cemetery, or tourism development schemes, but because the state government of Uttar Pradesh, controlled by the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (Indian People’s Party, commonly known as the BJP), removed it from its tourism brochure. This removal was the final incident in a series of public actions, and the one that gained global media attention. Earlier in the year, the newly elected Hindu nationalist chief minister Yogi Adityanath claimed in a speech that the Taj did not represent Indian culture. This statement was followed by the BJP legislator Sangeet Som’s public claim that the Taj Mahal was a ‘blot’ on India’s culture and built by traitors, which then led BJP leader Vinay Katiyar to resuscitate the theory that the tomb was once a temple dedicated to the Hindu god Shiva. These actions were by no means the first challenge to the Taj Mahal’s existence as a monument of Mughal achievement. The first case of disrespect was reported in 1830 when the first governor general of India Lord Bentinck wanted to dismantle the tomb and sell its marble at the going market rate. The story was never corroborated by eyewitnesses or written evidence but with every retelling it signalled the colonial approach to land management and the East India Company’s desire to turn its territories, along with their monuments, into profitable holding. Fanny Parks, the wife of an East India Company clerk, who sympathized with the Mughals, wrote in her travel diaries against the wanton destruction of their monuments in the name of profit. After she cites the article about Bentinck’s scheme in the Calcutta newspaper John Bull, she asks: ‘If this be true, is it not shameful? … By what authority does the Governor-general offer the taj for sale? Has he any right to molest the dead? To sell the tomb raised over an empress, which from its extraordinary beauty is the wonder of the world?’ When Parks’s diaries were published in 1850 in London her writings represented an early challenge to the East India Company’s valuing of India’s Mughal monuments for no more than their raw material.

Critical assessments of the recent resurgence of right-wing nationalism have rightly highlighted the role of social media in these troubling times, yet they are constrained by an overemphasis on celebrity leaders defined as populists. This article departs from a leader-centric analysis and the liberal frame that still largely informs assessment of political action, to foreground “fun” as a salient aspect of right-wing mobilization. Building on ethnographic fieldwork among the Hindu nationalists in India, I argue that fun is a metapractice that shapes the interlinked practices of fact-checking, abuse, assembly, and aggression among online volunteers for the right-wing movement. Furthermore, fun remains crucial for an experience of absolute autonomy among online users in ideological battles. Providing the daily drip feed for exclusion, fun as a metapractice bears a formal similarity to objectivity in its performative effects of distance and deniability.

This article investigates the multiple identities of Sikh workers employed in the expanding resource-based economy of British Columbia before . These workers went through a process of identity definition and redefinition common to many immigrants, even though their particular case had specific historical and local contexts. In British Columbia they naturally associated among themselves according to kinship, caste, and village affiliation, but their circumstances encouraged them to broaden their sense of who they were. Their experience in a foreign, but British, colonial setting, and their distance from the constraining influences of home (both the regulation of village and family and the supervision of the state) encouraged them to expand their horizons. In their overseas setting, these workers were exposed to panIndian nationalism and to developing Sikh ethno-nationalism in a more open and vital way than they would have been at home. Tensions between their community and the British regime in India were growing; and these tensions found their fullest expression in their overseas environment. Sikh workers on the Pacific coast of North America were at the leading edge of change in attitudes and loyalties among their compatriots at home and abroad, and, for this reason, they were – out of all proportion to their numbers – a source of concern to British imperial authorities. One could describe Sikh pioneers in British Columbia as a diaspora community, but with a major qualification. They were an immigrant population comprised of mostly transient workers, or, to use a generally accepted social science term, sojourners.1 Their demographics, strategies,

Abstract. The 2014 parliamentary election in India reduced Congress party to merely 44 seats in the lower house, big blow for a party whose history is integral the country’s founding narrative. In the last parliamentary election the Congress party polled only 19.3% of the votes declining from 28.6% in 2009, while on the other hand the main right wing party i.e. BJP won 282 parliamentary seats and 31% of the national votes. The extreme right-wing organisations have undoubtedly become the central pole of Indian politics. Moreover, its recent success in Uttar Pradesh provincial election, which is one of the most populated province with 215 million inhabitants, is the strongest evidence yet of the broader shift to the right and the BJP’s victory in UP state strengthens this shift. This paper intends to study the recent rise of extreme right-wing Hindu organisations in India. Most prominent among these organisations are RSS, BJP, VHP, Bajang Dal and Shiv Sena. However, all of them work together under the philosophy of Hindutva (i.e. Hindu-ness) and are rabidly anti-minority in their stance. The aim of this study is to highlight the recent rise in extreme right-wing Hindu organisations and to examine their ideas and philosophy regarding Indian history and culture. It is also useful to set this against a global context in which divisive and ultra-nationalist forces are on the rise within Europe and Donald Trump has assumed the US presidency. The study argues that the adoption of neoliberal economic policy in 1991 has increased GDP, but hardly any expansion in employment, which is known as ‘jobless growth’. The study also finds the far right encroachment into India’s liberal institutions and it seems that Indian polity is undergoing a historically unprecedented change with extreme-right to dominance into vast areas of ideology, economy and culture. Keywords: India, Hindutva, Neo-liberalism, Secularism and minorities. JEL. N30, N35, N40.

The resurgence of communalism (Hindu-Muslim antagonism) in India since the 1980s presents a serious challenge to secular Indian democracy and to the stability of the subcontinent. The striking feature of this phenomenon is not only the prominence, growth and popularity of informal, militant, extremist Hindu organizations such as the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) and the Bajrang Dal,1 but also the rise to power of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the Hindu nationalist party, at the center of national politics.2 In the main, it defines itself as in opposition to Islam and Muslims, attacks ‘the government policy of appeasing the Muslim minority’, and seeks to establish India as a primarily Hindu country. This rhetoric has also been associated with an increasing degree of violence. Throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, severe communal riots took place all over the country, in which at least 10 000 people lost their lives. This chapter attempts to set out an outline for an analysis that would trace the origins of the rise of Hindu nationalism in this period, in order to understand why it became so important, popular and persuasive, and, in particular, to find out why it developed when it did.