Introduction: Worlds of Hindu Nationalism and the Political Sphere

Abstract

This book is a study of an increasingly popular somatic practice that has had a profound effect on the configuration of religion, politics, and community in India. The creative experiments with the regimented script of physical culture (or physical training) that young Hindu nationalist volunteers increasingly undertake, have transformed it into a widely observed daily routine that is continually developed within and around the precinct of Hindu nationalist shakhas in lower-middle and middle-class neighborhoods in various cities and towns of contemporary India. As I argue, explorations with the script of physical training should be understood as being part of a broadly observed ethicopolitical mode through which political subjects and communities have been formed and mobilized in colonial and postcolonial India particularly in the state of Gujarat. Rather than framing physical culture as only being an instrument through which Hindu nationalist leaders create pliant volunteers, I illustrate in this book the manners in which the program of physical training that local Hindu nationalist organizers oversee has come to be nourished by a critical sensibility that branch volunteers have introduced to daily physical training and therefore the movement in general. Performed both according to and against the script of physical culture that the founding leaders of the Hindu nationalist apparatus disseminated in the early twentieth century, drill has become the site in which its embodied routines have been transformed within a perceived ethical zone of corporeal self-experimentation in which volunteers modify and elaborate its regimen on a daily basis.KeywordsPhysical TrainingCommunal ViolencePolitical ViolenceColonial StateNationalist MovementThese 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.