Hindu Nationalism in India

Abstract

Hindutva (“Hindu-ness,” shorthand for Hindu nationalism) in India is a chauvinist and majoritarian nationalism that conjures up the image of a peaceful Hindu Self vis-à-vis the threatening minority Other. Hindu nationalism normalizes a politics of fear and hatred by representing it as a defensive reaction to the threats supposedly posed by Muslims to the security of the individual Hindus as well as of the Hindu collective. Hindutva is porno-nationalism in its obsessive preoccupation with the predatory sexuality of the putative Muslim figure and the dangers to the integrity of the Hindu bodies. The proponents of Hindutva mobilize and generate negative stereotypes of Islam and Muslims to legitimize violence against actual Muslims living in India. This book investigates myriad ways in which the discourses of culture, insecurity, nationalism, gender, identity, and violence intersect in Hindu nationalism’s reactionary and right-wing politics of fear and imagination. While scholars and commentators have focused on different aspects of Hindutva in India and within the Indian diaspora, there is no other book-length ethnographic study of the centrality of fear, insecurity, and imagination in the Hindu nationalist project.KeywordsPolitical MovementPredatory SexualityHindu ReligionHindu CommunityScare QuoteThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.