“Enemies Within”. Hindu Nationalism, Crypto-conversion, and the Crematory Re-disciplining of the Non-religious Subject in Punjab (India)

India’s Right Turn

Using evidence regarding the consolidation of Hindu nationalism in India we put forward new ethnographic data about the variety of popular support for a Hindutva project and a new framework that proposes an interactive theory of social identity. This framework helps us understand how Hindu nationalism becomes embedded in society. We assert that Hindu nationalism in India could be fruitfully analysed by focusing on the processes through which ideas of exclusive nationalism spread among ordinary middle-class people and are expressed in micro-level psychological changes at the individual level. The consolidation of Hindu nationalism in India is being authored not only by parties or the state, but also by societal actors, specifically, ordinary middle-class Indians. Hindu nationalism has been spreading in micro-public spheres in a time of apparent peace and between elections, and with the participation of willing supporters. Building on our fieldwork and research in psychology and history, our conversations have also helped us to identify profiles of different types of nationalists, which we categorize as willing ethnic-nationalists, hardliners, bystanders, and moderates. Further, we suggest the need to focus on inter-linked micro-level mechanisms such as diffusion and emulation of Hindu-centric beliefs and ideas, mobilization by hardliners and organizations, and impunity resulting from protection by state agencies, which helps to create willing ethnic-nationalists and sustains Hindu nationalism. Evidence regarding social interactions from a variety of survey organizations concurs with our findings and our ethnographic material allows us to delve deeper into varieties of Hindu nationalist support across diverse ordinary people.

The paper examines how Hindu nationalist social service organizations, specifically the Deseeya Seva Bharathi (DSB), reconfigured the religious conception of ‘Seva’ to advance the project of constructing a Hindu social identity during the COVID-19 pandemic in the state of Kerala. The southern Indian state of Kerala has remained an exception in the story of the rise of the Hindu nationalist movement in contemporary India, which has repeatedly failed to make any considerable political inroads in the state. However, the disastrous economic consequences and livelihood challenges during the COVID-19 pandemic in the state, which was heavily dependent on foreign remittance and service industries, have opened up new spaces of engagement for Hindu nationalists. Drawing on the fieldwork conducted in central Kerala during the pandemic, this paper will elaborate on how the DSB used the crisis moment of the pandemic to reach out to economically and socially disadvantaged communities using the language of ‘Seva’ to build a Hindu social identity, which imbues the influence of majoritarian Hindu nationalist politics. The paper argues that the DSB’s articulation of ‘Seva’ as a distinct and superior form of social service that is ‘self-less’, ‘non-instrumental’ and ‘non-reciprocal’ is significant in understanding the growing appeal of Hindu nationalist social service in the contested political sphere of Kerala, which is marked by competing social provisions by the state as well as other secular and religious groups. The paper notes that the reconfiguration of ‘Seva’ as a continuous religious concept enables Hindu nationalists to attain greater acceptance and legitimacy that even the secular state welfare could not achieve, while also concealing the inherent instrumental nature of its social service towards the construction of a Hindu social identity in the region.

This article examines the Hindu Nationalist response to globalization in late twentieth-century India, highlighting their push for an alternative model centred on economic nationalism (Swadeshi). To do so, this article focuses on the prominent yet understudied Hindu Nationalist ideologue Dattopant Thengadi. Thengadi’s Swadeshist ideas imagined India as a potential World Teacher (Vishwaguru) rather than a subject to the pressures of international capital. He criticized India’s neoliberal regime and its globalization policies in the late twentieth century for being overly ‘westernized’ and ignoring the interests of domestic capital and India’s vernacular elites. By analysing Thengadi’s Swadeshist ideas, this article complicates the view that Swadeshi was simply an expression of the anti-globalization sentiments of a traditionalist faction within the Hindu Nationalist Movement. Furthermore, this article excavates the ideological roots of contemporary Hindu Nationalist affinity towards authoritarian neoliberalism, global capital, and capitalist oligarchs within Thengadi’s Swadeshist ideas in the twentieth century.

In November 2017, on the eve of his career's biggest release, Bollywood filmmaker Sanjay Leela Bhansali was in hiding under police protection. His magnum opus Padmaavat, originally scheduled to be released across the world on December 1, was postponed indefinitely. The film's lead actress, Deepika Padukone, had a bounty placed on her head. Posters of the film were already burning across India as the country's censor board dissected the film for inflaming “cultural sensitivities.” The furor centered on Bhansali's portrayal of a mythical fourteenth-century Hindu queen named Padmavati, lionized for burning herself alive in the face of a Muslim invasion. Karni Sena, a right-wing Hindu nationalist group, claimed that the (unseen) film showed their revered queen dancing and romancing the film's Muslim villain. The allegation was enough to spark calls for the film to be banned. Violent protesters, political opportunists, and cable news personalities followed suit. Could the increasingly violent threats from Hindu nationalists succeed in silencing Bhansali's life's work? Qureshi discusses how once the film was released and the Karni Sena withdrew its protests about the film, his own struggles with it began.

In this paper, I draw on digital ethnographic analysis of social media posting around the crisis. I argue that anxieties about the disorder of urban space co-exist alongside caste-based discourses of cleanliness and bodily regulation in Hindu nationalist social media users’ repudiation of COVID-19 as a disease of the urban poor. Alongside discourses of caste, their invocation of the alleged role of the Islamic proselytization group Tablighi Jama’at in the spread of the disease in urban North India, and discourses around the intimate life and spatial organization of poor urban Muslims, demonstrates how the Hindu nationalist response to the COVID-19 crisis focuses on the site of the Muslim male body as an invasive “viral” force. I then trace how the Hindu nationalist response to COVID-19 is integrated into existing concepts of unruly bodies, legitimizing a state-based response of repression and violence.

The ambitious Kashi Vishvanath Corridor in Varanasi (India) was inaugurated by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in March 2019. Set to turn the site into a ‘world-class’ pilgrimage destination, the project entails the construction of a monumental path that connects the Ganges river to the city’s main Hindu temple. In the middle of the area under ‘beautification’, stands the Gyanvapi mosque – a longstanding target of Hindu nationalist campaigns to ‘liberate’ supposedly originally Hindu places of worship from Muslim presence. By combining ethnographic material collected through longitudinal research with a critical analysis of local Hindi newspapers, I trace the genesis of the Corridor as a ‘heritage project’. I suggest that, through it, a new heritage regime is being put forward to suit, and provide evidence for, current Hindu nationalist projections of India as a Hindu nation. However, I also argue that this regime is not just the result of a top-down agenda, but originates from a counter-intuitive process: bottom-up mobilisations of heritage by residents (who were eventually evicted) seem to have informed, if not provoked, subsequent official narratives and the branding of the Corridor as heritage.

The 2018 Indian Supreme Court judgement decriminalizing homosexuality has been marked as a “decolonial act.” Section 377, which criminalized homosexuality, was a colonial law introduced by the British in India, which the postcolonial state maintained till 2018. The judgement may be “decolonial” in intent, but there are other simultaneous processes at play which are not so decolonial in praxis; this essay argues these processes are colonialism, brahminical supremacy, and Islamophobia. Caste-based violence is integral to Hinduism and intertwined with other matrices of oppression, making caste foundational to any claims of Hinduism as queer, trans and gender nonconforming friendly. Studying recent Hindu nationalist responses in favour of decriminalization of homosexuality in India, this essay traces how the Hindu Right deploys queerness to propagate its Islamophobic, casteist, and homohindunationalist agendas. The essay argues decolonizing the law, state, and sexuality would also mean annihilating caste and brahminical structures.

Based on narrations about the ways of finding justice among the Ayt Ḥdiddu in the decades preceding the establishment of French Protectorate rule, this article attempts to reconstruct the principles of tribal customary law under the conditions of tribal autonomy in the period of ssiba before 1933. The ethnographic material I collected in the mid-1990s represents an idealised retrospective view of the practices involved in conflict resolution. In this view they appear more orderly than they must have been in social reality, which I assume was much more flexible. Nevertheless, the accounts provide us with an understanding of the main characteristics of pre-colonial customary law: the complete absence of executive power, the importance of the threat or actual practice of violence, and the plurality of alternative courses towards conflict resolution based on different logic. Thus, the material discussed provides insights into the principles of finding justice under conditions of tribal autonomy as well as some hints concerning their historical transformations.

Gendered Violence as Revelation in John le Carré’s <em>The Night Manager</em>

As was the case in the West, there were all sorts of reactions to, and appropriations of, the discovery of a shared Aryan pedigree from the Indian subcontinent in popular, political, and religious discourse. The first section of this chapter briefly touches upon nineteenth- and early twentieth-century nationalistic co-options of the Aryan theory in terms of its applicability for Indian relations with the colonial power and for internal power dynamics among competing sets of interests among Indians themselves. A brief selection of these reactions as exemplified by Hindu nationalist responses is extracted to provide something of a parallel to the Aryan discourse in Europe during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The second section of the chapter describes the first stirrings of opposition to the theory itself, as inaugurated by prominent Hindu religious leaders.