India, America, and the Nationalist Apocalyptic

Abstract

India, America, and the Nationalist Apocalyptic Arun Chaudhuri Hinduism's future has a notably complex past and present, particularly so in its late twentieth‐century socio‐political forms. One especially stark vision appeared in the pages of an early issue of the American publication Hinduism Today. The magazine, a general information magazine about Hinduism started by a white Saivite convert named Subramaniyaswami in 1979, quickly became the most widely circulating publication about Hinduism outside of India. While the pages of Hinduism Today often contained simple descriptive features about various aspects of Hindu practice, philosophy, and mythology, the January 1986 issue leapt forcefully into the future with the appearance of an anonymously contributed article titled “2050: World Without Hinduism: A Fictional History of the Future.” This future was described in a foreboding, apocalyptic narrative of the annihilation of Hinduism and the crumbling of the surrounding world. The story unfolds through a series of snapshots of projected global political developments to come. The path to this future world without Hinduism was imagined to begin when a “Muslim biochemist” develops a new fertility drug which causes the world's Muslim population to skyrocket. This is followed by the global ascent of both Islam and Christianity, which is said to come at the direct cost of the Indian Hindus standing in the middle. At first, the story describes such Hindus as determined to bring reason to temper escalating dogmatism and competing hegemonies. Ultimately, they are unable to do so. The obliteration of Hindus and Hinduism altogether is envisioned to be complete by the year 2050, leaving what the article describes as a world being destroyed by the “Cross and Crescent crusades.” The consideration of a short story like this is not so much in assessing whether this imagined future, and its apocalyptic dimensions, are, or are not, going to happen. It is, rather, to consider the broader context that produces such an image of the future in the first place. This discussion examines such expressions by trying to place them into a larger context to think about their socio‐political effects. In doing so, this becomes a story that stands as both odd and yet familiar. In the larger context of the types of stories that the magazine Hinduism Today otherwise publishes, this anxious vision of the annihilation of Hinduism is certainly conspicuous. At the same time, there is a more familiar set of stories that this vision of Hinduism's demise so clearly draws upon. The nervous focus on Islam and Christianity as geopolitical forces threatening the existence of Hinduism is a well‐established theme of the last century of Hindu nationalist discourses in India. Hindu nationalism, broadly, the politicization of Hinduism toward a larger Hindu Indian state‐building project, tends to be characterized by a paradoxical doubt: on the one hand driven by a glorified exceptionalist Hindu civilizationalism, but on the other, perpetually uneasy about a sense of ongoing threat and persecution that prevents the realization of a glorious Hindu nation. It is a form of religious nationalism that can be fittingly described, in Daniel Segal and Richard Handler's terms, as a “ceaseless politics of culture—an ongoing effort to identify, create, and maintain the purported common denominator of their national identity.” This is a theory of nationalism in which the desired nation is envisioned anxiously, through a perpetually projected drive forward to (re)capture, or otherwise complete, some ideal state of national totality. Such then becomes the paradoxical nature of nationalism, which features, and indeed is propelled by, in‐built concerns over the nation's past and future existence/non‐existence. In this way, nationalism takes on a “factish” character, to borrow from Bruno Latour, in which the idealized image of the nation becomes powerfully compelling, while the processes through which it is constructed become masked. Such nationalist factish‐ness is often bound up with, and expressed through, narratives of threat and persecution. While narratives of threat have been a feature of Hindu nationalist discourse for the last century, particular attention in the discussion to follow will also be given to nationalism's increasingly apocalyptic overtones in the broader context of this current era of global insecurity. In this context...