Mapping Hindutva’s coordinates: global formations of nationalist space

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper studies the religious and spatial politics of contemporary Hindu nationalism through an examination of the construction of the Ram Temple in Ayodhya, India, and the Swaminarayan Mandir in Neasden, UK. Whereas the Neasden Temple is celebrated as a diasporic accomplishment that testifies to British multiculturalism, the Ayodhya temple has been mired by controversy and marred in violence that has spanned decades. Despite these differences, both temples have acquired their specific symbolic, visual and material salience through a global circulation of ideas, goods, peoples and aesthetics. I trace this circulation to show how these two temples serve to concretize and embody a specific historical narrative of ‘the Hindu nation’ through their shared architectural forms, as well as through the shared processes of their material construction. My argument is that the symbolic, visual and material relationships these temples instantiate across multiple ‘national’ locations can be read as territorializing mythic formations of ‘the Hindu nation’ as a global entity. The transnational crossings that secure the local specificities entailed in the construction of these temples demonstrate how contemporary formations of ‘globality’ are produced by, and in turn become the conditions of possibility for, the transformation of contemporary Hindu nationalism into a global phenomenon.