Hindu Nationalist Movement Research Articles

Religion, Ecology and Hindu Nationalism in India

Abstract In this paper I examine the construction of Hinduism as inherently “environmentally friendly” within religions and ecology discourses and how this construction has been appropriated by the Hindu nationalist movement in India to serve ends that are at odds with the pursuit of sustainable development. I begin by tracing the emergence of religions and ecology discourses and the assertion that Asian or Eastern religions are inherently environmentally friendly. This is followed by critiques of this neo-traditionalist approach for being anachronistic and essentialist, as well as for promoting a “myth of primitive ecological wisdom” that can have damaging effects on communities who live close to nature. This is because it reduces them to idealisations to serve other ends and has little impact on effecting policies that can improve their lives as well as addressing anthropogenic climate change. Next, I consider the construction of Hinduism as environmentally friendly within the context of the ascendency of Hindu nationalism. I examine the ways in which the claim to support sustainable development, alongside invoking neo-traditionalist religions and ecology discourse, is at odds with the actual policies pursued by Hindu nationalists, whose Bharatiya Janata Party has been in power since 2014. I will demonstrate that in its bid to spread a particular version of Hinduism across India alongside the growth of the market economy, some traditional livelihoods that are more sustainable than modern alternatives, such as nomadic pastoralism or Adivasi (tribal) economies, and the religio-cultural traditions that surround them, are being undermined and threatened with extinction.

Crisis as Opportunity: The Politics of ‘Seva’ and the Hindu Nationalist Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic in Kerala, South India

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.

The Hinduism and Hindu Nationalism of Lala Lajpat Rai

Lala Lajpat Rai was a prominent figure of the Arya Samaj, the influential nineteenth-century Hindu socio-religious reform movement. He is also seen as having sown the seeds of Hindu nationalism in the first decade of the twentieth century. Exploring Lajpat Rai’s thought between the 1880s and 1915, this article traces how felt imperatives of Hindu nation-building impelled him to regularly re-define Hinduism. These first prompted Rai to articulate a ‘thin’ Hinduism, defined less in terms of an insistence on a complex set of beliefs and more in broad, simple terms. They then induced him to culturalise Hinduism and make a distinction between ‘Hinduism’ and ‘Hindu culture’. The article ends by comparing the Hinduism and Hindu nationalism of Lajpat Rai and V.D. Savarkar, the chief ideologue of the Hindutva ideology, which is considered the main influence on India’s Hindu nationalist movement. It argues that while formulations of a thin and culturalised Hinduism enabled both men to articulate a ‘Hindu nationalism’, their nationalisms in fact remained qualitatively different. By scrutinizing intellectual trends and processes occurring in Rai’s thought, the article demonstrates that the modern ideology of Hindu nationalism impacted how Hindu religion was defined and re-defined and how such re-definitions can still produce distinct forms of Hindu nationalism.

Narendra Modi's ‘Gujarat Model’: re-moulding development in the service of religious nationalism

ABSTRACT Narendra Modi’s national leadership since 2014 is a significant marker of revitalisation of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in Indian politics. This article traces Modi’s association with the idea and rhetoric of development. He presented himself as vikaspurush (development man) and as a leader who would provide strong governance for India when he campaigned in the 2014 general elections. The Gujarat Model was showcased by him as the blueprint for development for the whole of India. However, a closer analysis of the developmental paradigm demonstrates that he has changed secular meanings and connotations of state-initiated development by associating state action with the rituals of pilgrimage used in the yatra (procession) politics of the Hindu nationalist movement. The article highlights the significance of the blurring of the lines between the administrative-bureaucratic process of planning and religio-spatial symbolism.

Leaving the Hindu Far Right

Why do people leave the world’s largest far-right organisation? In this article, we analyse six autobiographical defection accounts of ex-members of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the apex organisation of the Indian Hindu nationalist movement. Compiled here for the first time, an analysis of these accounts reveals that even the most disciplined and ideologically coherent far-right organisations suffer from internal organisational messiness and attrition. These accounts challenge the unique mythology that surrounds the RSS and gesture towards the methodological possibilities of discarding the ideology-driven analyses of the far right in favour of material analyses of the lives of far-right organisational members.

The shape of the Sangh: rethinking Hindu nationalist organisational ties

ABSTRACT The Indian Hindu nationalist movement is largely sustained by a network, hundreds of organisations strong, linked in greater or lesser degrees to a central organisational node: the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. In this paper I propose a new, critical, definition of this network: That which is constituted by organisational sites through which a central executive may exert authority, (a) through existing institutionalised communication channels, and (b) without coercion. By reconfiguring the analytic focus on this network, which I refer to as the Sangh, from its organisational nodes, to the linkages through which power travels, I propose a new research agenda on this Hindu nationalist organisational network that I argue more clearly identifies the spread, intentions and weaknesses of the far-right in India.

Chat-HI: Exploring Indian National Identity Through Machine-Generated Text

Situated at the crossroads of computational politics and intellectual history, the article abstracted here interrogates Chat-Hi:, the prototype of an interactive art installation using a natural language processing model trained on a large database of speeches by Indian prime ministers since 1946. Machine learning (ML)–powered, Chat-Hi: generates analytically intelligible answers to viewers’ questions, such as: What is the idea of India? The media installation acts as a conversational archive, gazing medium and interpretive layer [1]. It fosters playful, intimate, interactive and relational modes of historical attention [2], inviting participants to actualize the past through present political and social questioning. Building on existing accounts on the inclusive and modernist endeavor of the makers of postcolonial India, we interpret Chat-Hi:’s output to revisit historical argument by contrasting Jawaharlal Nehru’s emphasis on diversity with Narendra Modi’s stress on unity. Far from being anecdotal, this finding subtly signals the majoritarian turn of Indian democracy.With the help of Chat-Hi: and its human-machine question-answers digital interface, the article is concerned with the afterlives of historical figures, facetiously enjoining them to revisit a topical puzzle: What is the idea of India? Through interpellations of the sort addressed to Chat-Hi:, the article uses automated text generation trained on speeches by historical figures to convoke them into our turbulent times. We aim to interrupt the presentism [3] of politics to formulate answers, look for analogies [4] and—maybe—gather the courage to act from authoritative “specters” of the past [5]. Despite the fuzziness of modelgenerated texts, we insist on the usefulness of these political specters in facilitating the interpretation and identification of historical shifts in the representation of nationhood.The contrast between Prime Minister (PM) Jawaharlal Nehru’s (1946–1964) emphasis on diversity and PM Narendra Modi’s (2014–) focus on unity in Chat-Hi:’s outputs is a strong indication that the gradual political deepening of the Hindu nationalist project durably amends the statesponsored idea of India. The emphasis by Modi and his synthetic avatar on unity reflects the long-standing ideology of social harmony advocated by the Hindu nationalist movement, which gives primacy to a consolidated Hindu fold over the celebration of a multiplicity of religious and community identities. Machine-generated text by Modi affirms, for instance: “The reason for the culture of social cohesion and harmony in the society, just by doing research, I could clearly understand the processes.” Nehru’s contrary stress on diversity epitomizes a nationalism based on the normative belief [6] that what is to be represented as the people is not the Hindu majority but a more abstract collective bound by the principle of secular inclusiveness. This analysis finds echoes in Shiv Visvanathan’s study of India’s political modernity: “[Modi] erased a cosmopolitan India for a nationalist idea of the nation state, rejecting pluralism for predictability and uniformity, the univocality of patriotism. The Republic of Nehru sought plurality” [7]. The contrast between the two historical figures shows that there are at least two ideas of India, and that through conversing with automated specters of the past, the present can appear to us more clearly.The article further discusses the epistemic status of “human” insights derived from machine learning–generated content. We start by presenting the didactic potential of Chat-Hi:, in particular its ability to transmit historical emotions and ideas. Following this, we outline five potential methodological aids of the automated approach to historical inquiry. Chat-Hi: facilitates indeed a fresh encounter, thematic focus, comparability, confirmation and interactivity.The reader’s exposure to the computer-generated content triggers renewed attention, partly in the attempt to dispel ambiguity over the authenticity of the writing. Because puzzle, surprise and tension are feelings central to abductive reasoning [8] and interpretive research designs [9], they subject the reader to a fresh encounter [10] with characters such as Prime Ministers Atal Bihari Vajpayee or Chandra Shekhar. The speculative scrutiny of the synthetic text provides rich feedback, stimulating conversations between archival and machine-generated content. Such iterative analysis veers away from policy-oriented predicaments, focusing instead on historical insights. Second, the automated approach enables all the historical figures to answer the same question, thus offering thematically coherent text to the analyst. Responses to what the idea of India possibly is might venture into various political domains, referring to the country’s foreign policy or to its social issues, but they will ultimately give us clues about the ideological views of prime ministers on nationalism. Such structured output offers the possibility of comparing speakers, further facilitating the identification of contrastive and salient ideational as well as stylistic traits among them. Indeed, insights derived from ML speeches do not exist in a vacuum and can be further assessed in light of the original texts. This intertextual and contrastive approach can be further adjusted using more descriptive text analysis, which can ease the identification of lexical patterns among speakers in a given textual dataset.

‘I am not an animal’: Vikram Balagopal’s psychologisation of Hanuman in Simian

ABSTRACT This article discusses Vikram Balagopal’s mythological Indian graphic narrative Simian (2014), which is a retelling of particular episodes from the Ramayana from Hanuman’s point of view. The essay claims that Balagopal’s portrayal of Hanuman as a gelada baboon strips him of devotional/religious signifiers and allows readers to see him as a secular figure. The graphic narrative portrays this popular Hindu god as a heavily psychologised figure grappling with the ramifications of his special abilities, and questioning his liminal identity in the face of derogatory classifications by human beings. This representation is in opposition to the co-optation of Hanuman as a hyper-masculine warrior by an aggressive, resurgent Hindu nationalist movement. Simian also uses a reflective Hanuman to critique Ramayana’s anthropocentricism and gender and caste biases. It thus places itself into a long tradition of interrogative and subversive retellings of the Ramayana.

Framing the Collective “We” and the Antagonistic “Other” through Metacontrast: Intragroup Homogenization and Intergroup Polarization in the Hindu Nationalist Movement*

The right‐wing Hindu nationalist “Hindutva” movement in India has political control of the world’s most populous democracy. To gain insight into the tools of the movement, this paper examines Hindutva framing rhetoric. Social movement framing entails the crafting of movement messages to motivate collective identity and collective action. This paper takes a new approach to studying social movement framing by using the social psychological principle of metacontrast as an organizing theoretical framework. Metacontrast involves minimizing differences within the group (intragroup homogenization) and maximizing differences between groups (intergroup polarization). We argue dual homogenizing‐polarizing frames work in concert to construct a unified collective identity and mobilize concerted collective action. Using qualitative content analysis of two Hindutva organization websites, we find Hindutva framing rhetoric simultaneously homogenizes and polarizes through two framing strategies: a threat‐counter threat frame that portrays an antagonistic outgroup that must be countered with a unified ingroup, and a striking positive‐negative intergroup contrast that paints the ingroup as a moral protector and the outgroup as a vilified adversary. Notably, key to these efforts is the minimization of deeply entrenched, rigid caste differences. Our findings have implications for the study of social movements, nationalism, collective identity, collective action, and intergroup relations.

Why Muslims join the Muslim wing of the RSS

ABSTRACT The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) – the paramilitary corps that animates the contemporary Indian Hindu nationalist movement – increasingly relies on its Muslim wing to bolster its denials of extremism. The RSS claims hold that crowds of Muslims join its Muslim wing, the Muslim Rashtriya Manch, through organic nationalist awakenings that imply tacit acceptance of the RSS’ Hindu nationalist agenda. Based on a year of interview-based research in North and West India with more than 80 Manch members, defectors, critics and leaders, I provide empirical evidence that challenges the claim that the RSS is winning over Muslim minds. Instead, I suggest that Muslims join for largely instrumental reasons; for material reward and security, but also to rebuke traditional Muslim centres of power and to draw close to the charismatic leadership of Manch leader Indresh Kumar. While discussions of motivations are famously fraught, I rely on interviews not to conclusively list membership motivations, but to assess the claims made by the RSS. As Hindu nationalists consolidate and intensify their activities after the 2019 general election, understanding how the RSS does or does not ‘win over’ India’s Muslim communities is necessary groundwork to address the position of minorities in a Hindu nationalist future.

The Burden of Security

After the Babri mosque in the northern Indian city of Ayodhya was destroyed in 1992 by mobs of ‘volunteers’ mobilised by Hindu nationalist forces, a deed of license between the Uttar Pradesh Sunni Central Waqf Board and the Uttar Pradesh state government was signed. Through this license a portion of land in the Gyan Vapi mosque premises in Banaras (Varanasi) was handed over to the state for security purposes. The Gyan Vapi mosque is less than fifty meters from the Kashi Vishvanath temple, a notable Hindu pilgrimage destination. Although at the centre of security issues for centuries, the mosque has been a target of the Hindu nationalist movement that since the 1980s has aimed at the ‘liberation’ of allegedly originally Hindu places of worship. By analysing the evolution of security discourses in local Hindi newspapers and drawing on ethnography of everyday policing at the Kashi Vishvanath-Gyan Vapi compound, this article discusses moral frictions involved in securing a contested place of worship and argues that scopes and objects of securitisation can shift. In the case I discuss, the predominately Hindu police are shown to play an ambiguous role, caught as they are between their duty to secure the disputed mosque and their likely adherence to the increasingly dominant Hindu nationalist discourse. In overcoming these moral frictions, police through their everyday activity contribute to the shift of the object of securitisation from the mosque to the more ‘acceptable’ temple.

MarketizingHindutva: The state, society, and markets in Hindu nationalism

AbstractThe embrace of markets and globalization by radical political parties is often taken as reflecting and facilitating the moderation of their ideologies. This article considers the case of Hindu nationalism, orHindutva, in India. It is argued that, rather than resulting in the moderation of Hindu nationalism, mainstream economic ideas are adopted and adapted by its proponents to further theHindutvaproject. Hence, until the 1990s, the Hindu nationalist political party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), its earlier incarnation, the Jana Sangh, and the grass-roots organization, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), adopted and adapted mainstream ideas by emphasizing the state as the protector of (Hindu) society against markets and as a tool of societal transformation for its Hindu nationalist support base. Since the 1990s, Indian bureaucratic and political elites, including in the BJP, have adopted a view of the market as the main driver of societal transformations. Under the leadership of Narendra Modi, in particular, the BJP has sought to consolidate a broader support base and stimulate economic growth and job creation by bolstering the corporate sector and recreating the middle and ‘neo-middle’ classes as ‘virtuous market citizens’ who view themselves as entrepreneurs and consumers but whose behaviour is regulated by the framework of Hindu nationalism. These policies, however, remain contested within the Hindu nationalist movement and in Indian society generally. The BJP's discourse against ‘anti-nationals’ and the use of legal sanctions against dissent is an attempt to curb these challenges.

Hindu nationalism and the ‘saffronisation of the public sphere’: an interview with Christophe Jaffrelot

ABSTRACTThis in-depth interview with Professor Christophe Jaffrelot – one of the world’s most distinguished, prolific, and versatile scholars of contemporary South Asia – focuses on his first area of expertise: Hindutva and the Hindu nationalist movement. In conversation with Dr Edward Anderson, Jaffrelot considers the development of Hindutva in India up to the present day, in particular scrutinising ways in which it has evolved over the past three decades. The discussion explores the diversity of Hindu nationalism and how the movement and ideology have spread beyond the purview of the RSS into various new spaces and normalised, vernacular expressions of ‘neo-Hindutva’. The interview also reflects on recent tensions involving vigilantism and the banalisation of Islamophobia and anti-Dalit violence, and considers what Hindutva’s current proliferation will mean for the future of Indian democracy.

‘Smugglers of Truth’: The Indian diaspora, Hindu nationalism, and the Emergency (1975–77)

AbstractDuring the Indian Emergency (1975–77) a range of opposition groups and the Indian state competed to mobilize the Indian diaspora. The Emergency therefore needs to be understood as a global event. Opposition activists travelled overseas and developed transnational networks to protest against the Emergency, by holding demonstrations in their countries of residence and smuggling pamphlets into India. They tried to influence the media and politicians outside India in an effort to pressurize Indira Gandhi into ending the Emergency. An important strand of ‘long-distance’ anti-Emergency activism involved individuals from the Hindu nationalist movement overseas, whose Indian counterparts were proscribed and imprisoned during the period. Several key Hindutva politicians in recent decades were also involved in transnational anti-Emergency activism, including Subramanian Swamy and Narendra Modi. The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh's role in opposing the Emergency—particularly the way in which it enabled overseas Indians to act as ‘smugglers of truth’—remains an important legitimizing narrative for Hindu nationalists. Indira Gandhi's Congress government mounted its own pro-Emergency campaigns overseas: it attacked diasporic opposition activists and closely monitored their activities through diplomatic missions. The state's recognition of the diaspora's potential influence on Indian politics, and its attempts to counter this activism, catalysed a long-term change in its attitude towards Indians overseas. It aimed to imitate more ‘successful’ diasporas and began to regard overseas Indians as a vital political and geopolitical resource. The Emergency must be reassessed as a critical event in the creation of new forms of transnational citizenship, global networks, and long-distance nationalism.

Workers and the Right Wing: the Situation in India

AbstractWhy and how does a right-wing social movement mobilize workers along class lines? The Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh (BMS), the labor wing of the Hindu nationalist movement in India, marshals working-class support by emphasizing workers’ class positions and identities. Following Gramsci, I argue that the BMS represents the Hindu right's recognition of workers’ class power and is thus key to the Hindu Right's efforts to incorporate workers into hegemonic capitalist social relations. The form that right-wing activity takes depends on the histories of working-class mobilization and the class power of workers. Thus, right-wing actors do not exclusively dictate the terms of the engagement with workers, but workers also exercise agency in shaping and contesting this interaction.

Lessons from the past for the future: The definition and mobilisation of Hindu nationhood by the Hindu nationalist movement of India

Guided by a self-categorisation and social-identity framework of identity entrepreneurship (Reicher & Hopkins, 2001), and social representations theory of history (Liu & Hilton, 2005), this paper examines how the Hindu nationalist movement of India defines Hindu nationhood by embedding it in an essentialising historical narrative. The heart of the paper consists of a thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006) of the ideological manifestos of the Hindu nationalist movement in India, “Hindutva: Who is a Hindu?” (1928) and “We, or Our Nationhood Defined” (1939), written by two of its founding leaders – Vinayak Damodar Savarkar and Madhav Sadashiv Golwalkar, respectively. The texts constitute authoritative attempts to define Hindu nationhood that continue to guide the Hindu nationalist movement today. The derived themes and sub-themes indicate that the definition of Hindu nationhood largely was embedded in a narrative about its historical origins and trajectory, but also its future. More specifically, a ‘golden age’ was invoked to define the origins of Hindu nationhood, whereas a dark age in its historical trajectory was invoked to identify peoples considered to be enemies of Hindu nationhood, and thereby to legitimise their exclusion. Through its selective account of past events and its efforts to utilise this as a cohesive mobilising factor, the emergence and rise of the Hindu nationalist movement elucidate lessons that further our understanding of the rise of right-wing movements around the world today.

At the Intersection of the Sacred and the Legal: Rights for Nature in Uttarakhand, India

In March 2017, the High Court of Uttarakhand in India ruled in the Ganges and Yamuna and the Glaciers cases that the Ganges and Yamuna rivers, the Gangotri and Yamunotri glaciers, as well as other natural objects in the state of Uttarakhand enjoy legal rights. In both cases, the High Court established the natural objects as legal minors and conferred guardianship responsibilities on several individuals within the state government of Uttarakhand. These judgments create novel legal rights for nature and, as such, present powerful examples of the increasing relevance of rights-centred environmental protection. The impact of this case law, however, is uncertain. As a start, the legal rights entrusted to nature are underpinned by such broad definitions of 'harm' that it is difficult to envision successful implementation. Further, the Ganges and Yamuna case is currently stayed pending appeal to the Supreme Court, which may decide to overturn the High Court's findings. Still, these cases are important to analyse, especially in light of how constructing nature as a legal subject/legal person shifts environmental law away from public law and into the sphere of private law. Also, the Ganges and Yamuna case draws explicitly on Hinduism to support the sacred status of the Ganges and Yamuna rivers, which, in the current context of the Hindu Nationalist Movement, may prove controversial.

Retraction: Understanding Islamophobia in Asia: The Cases of Myanmar and Malaysia

In June 2013, Alvin Tan, a prominent Malaysian blogger, posted on Facebook a picture of his girlfriend and himself eating bak kut teh (pork) with the caption “Selamat Berbuka Puasa” (Happy Breaking Fast). The duo had described the dish as “wangi, enak, menyelerakan” (fragrant, delicious, appetizing) and also included a “Halal” logo. During the same month, Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar faced one of the community's worst persecution acts, with several hundred people murdered by Buddhist religious zealots inspired by extremist Buddhist monks. These are but some examples of Islamophobia in Asia. Buddhist nationalist groups such as the Bodu Bala Sena in Sri Lanka and the 969 Movement in Myanmar have encouraged the anti-Muslim violence. In India, the rise of the Hindu nationalist movement has seen the forced conversion of Muslims and increased incidences of violence against Muslims. Despite this endemic rise of Islamophobia, there has been little academic research conducted on Islamophobia in Asian countries. This is contrasted by the trends of Islamophobia as a phenomenon being well-documented in the West. The rise in terror attacks within Europe, the refugee crisis on the same continent, and the strengthening of the right-wing nationalist parties has resulted in the rise of Islamophobia in Europe and North America. This article seeks to better understand Islamophobia in the Asian context through the case studies of Myanmar and Malaysia. It argues that Islamophobia in these countries is largely the result of domestic socio-economic and political issues, rather than the international narrative against Islam and Muslims. There are three parts to this article: first, the discourse against Islam in both countries will be examined. Second, the factors that caused the rise of Islamophobia in both Myanmar and Malaysia will be looked at. Historical ethnic tensions, economic gaps between different communities, state-initiated religious persecution and the rise of right-wing religious organizations will be discussed in this regard. This section will postulate the view that Islamophobia can occur within countries such as Malaysia, especially when the minority groups are dominant in the economic sphere. The article will conclude by analyzing whether the manifestation and raison d'être of Islamophobia in Asia is different from the West. The outcome of the inquiry will provide useful analytical tools in studying Islamophobia within the Asian context.

“The world’s best minority”: Parsis and Hindutva’s ethnic nationalism in India

ABSTRACTThere is an assumption that nationalist movements which are constituted by an ethnic majority are hostile towards all minorities, so how does one account for such a movement’s affection for one minority and hostility for another? In this paper I explore this question using the case study of a Hindu nationalist movement in India called Hindutva which simultaneously expresses hostility towards Muslims and affection for another minority known as the Parsis. I argue in societies that imagine themselves as plural there is a type of nationalist thought premised upon the existence of both exemplary and threatening minorities. An exemplary minority is imagined as loyal and acculturating, illustrating both how a minority should relate to the majority and why other minorities are threatening. While an historical argument enables the distinction between the majority and minorities, a plural hierarchy of minorities is enabled by mythical stories of coexistence and conflict.

Architectures of Fear and Spaces of Hope in Banaras

Identity of Banaras was once again back in the limelight with the Bhartiya Janta Party (BJP) Prime Ministerial candidate Mr. Narendra Modi choosing to represent the city. Known also as Kashi and Varanasi, Banaras indeed played a strategic role in representing the politics the incumbent party believed in. With the overwhelming majority to Modi, the city of Banaras is further idealized as an archetypal city of the Brahminical Hinduism with the spectacular images of temples and ghats that remain teeming with Pandas and devotees. This particular Hindu identity of the city has been constructed through the selective images over time from the colonial period onwards in the 19th century. Identity formation, whether of a community or a city, social or symbolic is spatially situated process and spatial centrality is important in understanding the identity of a city in general and Banaras in particular. We in this paper argue that how in case of Banaras some spaces were mobilized and centralized to create this hindutva identity. In this representational mobilization of identity, the city of Banaras represents a spectacular space removed from its own spatiality. Proclaimed space of Banaras seems not to be a product of social practices rather it is symbolic spaces generated through the trajectories of ideologies of certain groups. This process of formation of identity is not a radical departure, rather it as a culmination of re-emerging Hindu nationalist movement during 19th and 20th century. In this paper, we bring forth the celebration of Ravidas Jyanti as the performance of possibilities and we try to identity the spaces of hope amidst the overarching outcry. Thinking through the categories of space and performance and their interpolations in Banaras, this article attempts to reconfigure the identity of this city beyond the Hindu right-wing rhetoric and pretension.