Hindu Nationalism Research Articles

Holy Science: The Biopolitics of Hindu Nationalism, by Banu Subramaniam

Holy Science: The Biopolitics of Hindu Nationalism, by Banu Subramaniam

Gender, Religion and Nationalism: Locating Muslim women in Indian Nationalist Discourse in Momtaz Shah Nawaz’s The Heart Divided

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century colonial India, with the dramatic changes in socio-political scenario the nationalist discourse in India was significantly reshaped. And with the rise of a new nationalist discourse in India, the position and representation of women in Indian nationalist discourse was rethought and redefined – first, because of the rise of Goddess-centric nationalist rhetoric and secondly, the nationalist leaders’ promotion of and call for women participation in the freedom movement. Historian, critics and social scientists find women liberation movement, social reform and cultivation of feminist discourse in India intertwined with the rise of nationalism or national movement in the country. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century India witnessed the emergence of nationalist concepts of “New Women”, “Modern Indian Women” or “Mother India”. And the rise of these ideas substantiates both the subjective and objective position of women in Indian nationalist discourse. But so far as the position or representation of Indian Muslim women in Indian nationalist discourse is concerned, it has always been difficult to address the issue. While addressing this problem of the position of Indian Muslim women in Indian nationalist discourse some more points and facts need to be taken into account– first, the rise of Two Nation Theory which demanded a separate country for the Muslims of undivided India; secondly, the emergence of the secularist trend of Indian nationalism; thirdly, the significant rise of Hindu nationalism and fourthly, Muslims’ exceptional adherence to the practice of women seclusion due to their religious sentiment. In her novel The Heart Divided (1957) Momtaz Shah Nawaz, a Muslim woman writer of the undivided India, addresses all these concerns. In the novel she tries to figure out a definite role and position of Indian Muslim women in the nationalist discourse of colonial India during anti-colonial movement. My paper tries to explore the position of Muslim women in Indian nationalist discourse through a critical reading of the said novel. It attempts to find out how Muslim women had both the subjective and objective position in Indian nationalism during the freedom struggle. It also tries to address whether the nationalist terms like “New Women”, “Mother India” or “Modern Indian Women” are applicable for the Indian Muslim women.

Resisting the configurations for a Hindu nation

The protests against the CAA (Citizenship Amendment Act) and a nationwide NRC (National Register of Citizens) have emerged as an important challenge against right-wing majoritarianism in India. These protests frame themselves as part of a struggle to save the Indian constitution and its secular character. How can we understand the role of such protests in resisting the right-wing efforts for a Hindu Rashtra, or a Hindu nation where minorities, especially Muslims, will be marked as undesirable Others? The article attempts to answer this question by looking at Hindu Rashtra as a performative project. The manner in which the processes of anti-CAA-NRC protests attempt to challenge the claims of Hindutva narratives are analyzed. The article explores the possibility of undoing the Hindutva ecosystem of hate through cultural and media materials as well as bodies from the sites of protests which assert the constitutionally guaranteed principle of equality

The politics of saving Muslim women in India: Gendered geolegality, security, and territorialization

In this paper, we critically approach the idea of “saving Muslim women” by examining two prominent judgments by the Supreme Court of India and their attendant debates: Mohammad Ahmed Khan vs. Shah Bano Begum and Others 1985 AIR 945, popularly known as the Shah Bano judgment and Shayara Bano vs. Union of India And Others WP(C) No.118 of 2016, popularly known as the Triple Talaq (divorce) judgment. Using the frameworks of feminist geopolitics, femonationalism, and feminist geolegality, we analyze the debates around the Shah Bano and Triple Talaq judgments, looking at how the state employs and often usurps the narrative of gender equality and women's rights for its own purposes. We highlight how laws ostensibly for the protection of Muslim women (and the discourses that surround them) have the effect of strengthening the Hindu nationalist state, and furthering masculinist state building and territory making. By focusing debates on the categories of Muslim men and women, the law becomes a means to resolve the “problem” of Muslims in India.

Sliding from majoritarianism toward fascism: Educating India under the Modi regime

While the Modi regime in India shares many exclusionary features in common with authoritarian populists elsewhere, one distinguishing feature is its umbilical relationship to the semi-fascist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), whose long-term goal has been the establishment of a Hindu rashtra (nation). One of the major instruments for achieving this has been education, with the RSS seeing cultural hegemony as more foundational than political control. This article examines the transformation of school and higher education under the Modi regime in an effort to bring India more in line with the Hindu nationalist vision of its parent body, and the degree to which being in government supports or creates contradictions with the RSS vision.

‘Blackened face’: Emotional Community and the Hindu Nationalist Interpretation of History

Abstract When in 1664 the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb appointed a Rajput general, Mirza Raja Jai Singh Kachwaha, as commander-in-chief of a punitive army sent against the Maratha warlord Shivaji, contemporary authors recorded it dispassionately as a trivial occurrence. Emotional perception of the event had changed drastically by the early twentieth century, when the proponents of Hindu nationalism began to view Jai Singh with disgust and anger as a ‘traitor to the Hindu nation’. Analysis of ‘Letter of Maharaja Shivaji to Mirza Raja Jai Singh’ (‘Mahārāj Śivājī kā patr Mirzā Rājā Jai Siṅgh ke nām’), by the Hindi classic poet Suryakant Tripathi Nirala, discloses the communicative means employed by the author to ‘reboot’ the emotional attitudes of his readers and to rope them into the emotional community of Hindu nationalists.

Islamophobia, mental health and psychiatry: South Asian perspectives.

Asia is the largest and the most populous continent on earth. South Asia has a population of around 1.8 billion,thus constituting about one fourth of humanity. India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bhutan, the Maldives and Afghanistan are the countries in South Asia and many of them are Muslim-majority nations. Although India is predominantly a Hindu nation with a total population of 1.4 billion, there are more Muslims in India than in Pakistan and other South Asian nations. Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Sikhs and followers of other religions have lived peace fully in South Asia for centuries. However, certain incidents of communal violence and other untoward occurrences in SouthAsia suggest that Islamophobia is present here too. The authors discuss demography, cultures and the possible effect of Islamophobia on the mental health of the people of South Asia.

The rise of Hindu nationalism in historical perspective

ABSTRACT The article traces the rise of Hindu nationalism and its rise to power. It identifies three major variables responsible for Hindu nationalism’s rise and success. First, British historiography that made the Hindu-Muslim animosity the centerpiece for historical analysis in order to justify British rule coupled with a deliberate policy of divide and rule that widened the chasm between the two communities. Second, the writings of Savarkar and other ideologues such as Golwalkar that presented this dichotomy starkly and painted the Indian Muslim as the quintessential “other” thus arguing that Hindus alone were the real owners of the land and Muslims were interlopers. Third, and possibly the most important, the partition of the country in 1947 that hived away the Muslim majority areas from India thus rendering Indian Muslims demographically and politically marginal if not irrelevant in independent India thus paving the way for the eventual capture of power by Hindu nationalists.

Introduction From Populism to Decolonisation: How We Remember in the Twenty-First Century

This article introduces, and contextualises, the contributions to the collection The global crisis in memory. Since the 1980s, the idea of ‘coming to terms with the past’, shaped by the values of neoliberal economics and liberal politics, became part of a globally-powerful consensus over how societies should overcome violent and traumatic experiences. In the 2010s, in the context of the global rise of populist nationalisms, political hostility linked to global migration, and increasingly vocal criticisms of a neoliberal order, this consensus was powerfully challenged. Rather than rejecting memory politics, new political formations have in fact embraced them. The white resentment embodied in the ‘History Wars’ controversy in Australia; legislation such as the Polish ‘Holocaust Bill’; the growing scepticism of African states towards the International Criminal Court; or the rewriting of the histories of Indian independence by Hindu nationalists all reveal the ways in which diverse movements critiqued and reworked previous memory tropes. At the same time, attempts to decolonise western memory have engaged actively with previous manifestations of memory around which apparent consensus had been constructed. Moreover, these various new memory practices increasingly have their own alternative internationalisms too, reaching across or beyond regions in new transnational formations.

The Question of Dalit Conversion in the 1930s

In June 1936, the Hindu Mahasabha leader B. S. Moonje and the Dalit leader and trenchant critic of Hinduism Dr B. R. Ambedkar jointly proposed mass conversions of the ‘untouchables’ to Sikhism. According to Ambedkar, if the untouchables converted to Sikhism, they would leave the Hindu religion but not Hindu culture. The untouchable converts to Sikhism would escape caste oppression without getting ‘denationalized’. This initiative provoked a major controversy, and leaders as diverse as M. M. Malaviya, Mahatma Gandhi, M. C. Rajah and P. N. Rajabhoj expressed their views on the subject. This article explores what Ambedkar meant by expressions like ‘de-nationalization’ and ‘Hindu culture’. Malaviya’s anxieties about the weakening of the Hindu community because of this initiative, Rajah’s fear that mass conversions could lead to a Sikh–Hindu–Muslim problem at a national level, Gandhi’s emphasis on spiritual values and the voluntary removal of untouchability in a spirit of repentance, and Tagore’s universalist and humanist attitude towards religion are explored. The complex political and intellectual responses of Hindu and Dalit leaders to the proposed mass conversions to Sikhism in the mid-1930s reveal dimensions not often considered in mainstream narratives about Hindu nationalism or Dalit conversions.

The Improbability of a Temple: Hindu Mobilization and Urban Space in the Delhi Shiv Mandir Agitation of 1938

The 1920s and 1930s were decades of intense religious polarization and violence in many parts of British India. These decades were also especially empowering ones for Hindu nationalist organizations in Delhi. So, it rankled Hindu leaders that Delhi’s built environment had a dearth of Hindu sacred structures to attest to their power, on account of the city’s past status as a Mughal capital. Instead, transitory spatial markers of local veneration made up its somewhat ephemeral Hindu sacred geography. The Shiv Mandir agitation of 1938 was a collective attempt by Hindu volunteers to forcibly occupy government land in a prominent arena of the city as a symbolic restitution of this historical inequality. The agitation itself had two parts—first, the occupation of a plot of land as a temple and, second, the aggregation of legal arguments supporting ownership of the plot for the Hindu public. By combining these two strategies, the Shiv Mandir agitation laid out the political and legal preconditions necessary for the production of a more conspicuous and enduring material landscape of organized Hindu religiosity in the city. Through this process, Hindu nationalist organizations consolidated themselves as the ultimate public custodians of temples and temple land. This was a powerful role that drew its prestige in good measure from control over prime urban property.

“A Christy Minstrel, a Harlequin, or an Ancient Persian”?: Opera, Hindustani Classical Music, and the Origins of the Popular South Asian “Musical”

The story of South Asian colonial modernity and music offers up a multidirectional and polymorphous conceptual terrain featuring, among many agents, Hindustani royalty, touring minstrel and burlesque troupes, Jesuit missionaries and orientalists, and not least, social reformists. Nevertheless, scholarship on the history of Hindustani music consistently traces its development through classicization against the rise of Hindu nationalism while overlooking other palpable clues in the colonial past. This article argues for a substantial reevaluation of colonial South Asian music by positing an alternative and hitherto invisible auditory stimulus in colonial Asia's aural landscape: opera. Janaki Bakhle contends that “as a musical form, opera put down even fewer roots than did orchestral, instrumental Western classical music,” even though she subsequently states that “Western orchestration did become part of modern ceremonial activities, and it moved into film music even as it was played by ersatz marching bands.” Bakhle further argues that Hindustani music underwent processes of sanitization and systematization within a Hindu nation-making project, a view that has been complicated by historians such as Tejaswini Niranjana. Niranjana describes how scholarship that focuses exclusively on the codification or nationalization of Hindustani music through the interpellation of a Hindu public neglects “sedimented forms of musical persistence.” Not dissimilarly, Richard David Williams highlights how the singular emphasis on the movement of Hindustani music reform risks reducing the heterogeneous and complex musicological traditions in the colonial period to the output of a single, monolithic, middle-class “new elite.” Previous scholarship, he argues, concentrates on “one player in a larger ‘economy’ of musical consumption.” Following these calls for more textured perspectives on South Asian musical cultures, I suggest a somewhat heretical thesis: that opera functioned as a common mediating stimulus for both the colonial reinscription of Hindustani music as classical as well as the emergence of popular pan-Asian musical genres such as “Bollywood” music.

How can we model ethnic democracy? An application to contemporary India

AbstractThe status of India as the world's largest democracy is often lauded, but the re‐election of the overtly Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party in 2019 has increased concerns about the threat to India's multinational democracy and the rule of law. India is not the only democracy facing challenges related to majoritarian nationalism; there has been a worldwide rise in the language of majority ‘rights’ in democratic systems. The importance of analysing the extent to which the rights of majorities are being increasingly institutionalized within democratic systems has therefore increased. It is vitally important to identify whether tendencies toward ethnic democracy are increasing (and the conditions under which they do so). There may well be red flags that emerge in democratic systems, heralding the potential direction of travel. This article proposes a methodology to identify degrees of ethnic democracy using a combination of formal and informal measures and illustrates it by assessing India through an examination of anti‐Muslim policies and rhetoric.

Was Swami Vivekananda a Hindu Supremacist? Revisiting a Long-Standing Debate

In the past several decades, numerous scholars have contended that Swami Vivekananda was a Hindu supremacist in the guise of a liberal preacher of the harmony of all religions. Jyotirmaya Sharma follows their lead in his provocative book, A Restatement of Religion: Swami Vivekananda and the Making of Hindu Nationalism (2013). According to Sharma, Vivekananda was “the father and preceptor of Hindutva,” a Hindu chauvinist who favored the existing caste system, denigrated non-Hindu religions, and deviated from his guru Sri Ramakrishna’s more liberal and egalitarian teachings. This article has two main aims. First, I critically examine the central arguments of Sharma’s book and identify serious weaknesses in his methodology and his specific interpretations of Vivekananda’s work. Second, I try to shed new light on Vivekananda’s views on Hinduism, religious diversity, the caste system, and Ramakrishna by building on the existing scholarship, taking into account various facets of his complex thought, and examining the ways that his views evolved in certain respects. I argue that Vivekananda was not a Hindu supremacist but a cosmopolitan patriot who strove to prepare the spiritual foundations for the Indian freedom movement, scathingly criticized the hereditary caste system, and followed Ramakrishna in championing the pluralist doctrine that various religions are equally capable of leading to salvation.

Violence, Urban Anxieties and Masculinities: The ‘Foot Soldiers’ of 2002, Ahmedabad

This paper engages with retrospective accounts of young Dalit men and their participation in the communal conflict of 2002 in Ahmedabad, Gujarat. My ethnographic landscape is Gomtipur, a densely populated mixed (Dalit and Muslim) suburban neighbourhood that developed in the 1960s and 1970s to house the migrant mill workers who had moved into the city from other parts of Gujarat and India more widely. The de-industrialisation process of the 1980s and the subsequent rise of Hindu nationalism in the neighbourhoods meant that the 1990s and 2000s saw increasing segregation along religious lines and a rise in communal conflicts. Second- and third-generation migrant men were recruited into the nationalist project as ‘foot soldiers’ to execute violence in 2002. Material benefits and social mobility have been proposed as the main explanations for their participation. These narratives, when juxtaposed against the history of de-industrialisation in the area, reveal the men’s ambiguous and contradictory relationship with Hindu nationalism, their justifications for participation in the violence and a nuanced and structured co-option of them through signs and symbols and a systematic recreation of caste and class hierarchies.

Hindu nationalism and media violence in news discourses in India

ABSTRACT The mainstream media and communication discourses in India in the present times engender ‘media violence’ embedded in the dominant productions of ‘Hinduism’ together with aspirations for neoliberal development. The media violence engenders indigenous forms of racism and colonialism. This article attempts to examine the nature of these productions through critical theories of postcoloniality and decolonial approaches put into conversation with theories of journalism. Through the examination of the instances of selective silencing of journalistic voices, and erasures embedded within the journalistic practices, this article argues for critical theories of press freedom. The productions of racial superiority and internal colonialism in India only begin to make sense when read together with the interplays of religion, class, caste, and global reach of the privileged sections of Indian society, namely the civil society. Against the backdrop of the historical role of the press in India in freedom struggle against colonial rule, the history of press censorship after independence, the civil society voices that are amplified in the neoliberal restructuring of news media, and the Dalit movements that expose the Brahminical dominance in the imaginary of the ‘Indian culture’, the meanings of race and coloniality in India unfold.

Performing pain: Sindhi Sufi music, affect, and Hindu-Muslim relations in western India

ABSTRACT This article examines the affective enactment of the Sufi emotional concept of the pain of separation by Muslim singers in Kachchh, Gujarat, a border region in western India adjacent to Sindh, Pakistan. In a discussion of two musical genres that feature the Sufi poetry of Shāh ‘Abdul Lat̤īf Bhiṭā’ī (1689–1752 CE) – kāfī and shāh jo rāg̈ – I argue that the musical performance of pain is ethically efficacious as well as politically salient. Drawing on eighteen months of fieldwork in Kachchh in 2014–2018, the article traces the ways in which poetry performers and enthusiasts conceive of musico-poetic pain as a form of Islamic worship that has ethical benefits for performers and listeners, such as tranquility and the purification of one’s heart. It thus demonstrates how Sindhi Sufi music functions as an affective, embodied, gendered and vernacular means of engagement with the Islamic discursive tradition. The latter portion of the article widens the focus, taking the pain of separation as a lens through which to examine Hindu-Muslim relations in Kachchh, where Hindu nationalism and Islamic reform have contributed to socio-religious polarisation since the 1980s. Drawing on examples from local musical history, I explore the political salience of the pain of separation by showing how the musical performance of Shāh Bhiṭā’ī’s female-voice poetry historically facilitated interreligious forms of male sociality in Kachchh.

Narendra Modi’s social media election campaign and India’s delegative democracy

ABSTRACT This paper qualitatively analyzes tweets sent by India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi and responses to the tweets in the month leading up to his May 2019 electoral win. Several dominant rhetorical themes emerged from the analysis of the data, including Modi as omnipresent and Modi as an advocate for democracy who encourages voters to vote. The dominant theme that emerged from his supporter’s responses was Modi as a leader who supports Hindu nationalism or Hindutva. Both Modi and his supporters presented him as a strong leader who could stand up to Islamic terrorism and one who would invest in national security and India’s army. The author concludes that India’s democracy, under Modi’s leadership, is akin to what Argentinian political scientist Guillermo O’Donnell has termed delegative democracy. Delegative democracy is marked by extreme individualism of the leader, majoritarian politics, and minimal emphasis on democratic institutional building. In both Modi’s and his supporter’s Twitter rhetoric, there was no commitment to inclusive representation within or strengthening of democratic institutions, and while allowing for effective contestation in the form of elections, there was no evidence of respecting India’s traditional constitutional norms, such as secularism and respect for minority rights.

Left and communal problem: India (1925-47)

Communal disturbances broke out in Bengal over the question of victimization of some jute workers who had participated in a demonstration against the jute ordinance. Two workers had been killed and 40 injured in these disturbance. Subhas Chandra Bose had observed, “The strike breakers have fomented communal strife in order to put an end to the strike.” In the annual session of Hindu Sabha at Nagpur, the leading communal ideologue V.D. Savaarakr pleaded in his address for a Hindu National Front’ and appealed to communal minded person to boycott congress by stopping all kinds of monetary helps to it in running its affairs.

That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation

The author is widely regarded as one of today’s leading theological thinkers. This book glows with a kind of erudition and intellectual sophistication for readers with enough patience to bore through its often gnarly locutions. But the case it sets forth is hardly novel, nor will it be compelling for readers who privilege the Bible’s consistent representation of God, humans, eternal life, and everlasting judgment over the opinion of many theologians in recent generations that a loving God and an eternal hell are logically incompatible.The story is wearingly familiar, though from a pastoral viewpoint heart wrenching. As a youth, David Bentley Hart became skeptical toward the dominant historic Christian understanding of the Bible’s teaching on heaven and hell. He came, almost immediately it seems, to doubt that it is morally permissible “to love an omnipotent and omniscient God who has elected to create a reality in which everlasting torture is a possible final destiny for any of his creatures” (p. 13). This book is an extension of that doubt, phrased as a brave (and not always accurate) assertion that from the beginning Christian universalists were dominant in the church, and that those who are not universalists today are rejecting both the Bible’s teaching and the necessary conclusions of logic.The Bible’s true teaching on this subject, in Hart’s reading, is found in texts isolated from their immediate and whole-Bible contexts, such as 1 Tim 2:3–4 (“Our savior God … intends that all human being shall be saved and come to a full knowledge of the truth,” quoted on the back of the dedication page). Or it is found by negating Jesus’s frequent and harrowing pronouncements on the subject, often by urbane trivialization: “I am quite certain that, while Christ employed all sorts of imagery regarding final judgment, and spoke of a discrimination between the righteous and the wicked, and spoke also of the dire consequences for the latter of their actions in this life, none of it should be received as anything other than an intentionally heterogenous phantasmagory, meant as much to disorient as to instruct” (p. 119, emphasis added). Many Christians affirm the perspicuity of Scripture and regard Jesus as the consummate truth teller. Here, Hart presents him as intentional deceiver. Of course the reader has Hart to supply the antidote for Jesus’s (or at least the Gospel writers’) intentional “heterogenous phantasmagory.” Since the physical features of a mythic world with a real heaven and real hell have disappeared for Hart, he opines that “perhaps it is past time that we considered whether the spiritual structure of that vanished cosmos, at least in some its more garish details, could disappear as well without any great damage to our religious imaginations” (p. 207).For my money, our religious imagination is less important than the testimony of Scripture, affirmed by a vast array of interpreters from ancient times down to the thousands of martyrs annually at present, who lay down their lives in the sure hope of eternal life and with the deep consolation that God’s (and therefore the faithful martyrs’) enemies will not escape their just end. Hart’s world seems far removed from the sweat and the terror but also the brave faith of Christian saints facing Boko Haram, Hindu nationalists, Shiite militias, and the like. His sweeping solipsistic conclusion (pp. 208–9) that there will be eternal punishment for no one stands in stark contrast to majority Christian conviction through the centuries, and proudly so: Hart’s “conscience must not abide by the rule of the majority … the authority of a dominant tradition or of a reigning opinion has no weight whatever. And my conscience forbids assent to a picture of reality that I regard as morally corrupt, contrary to justice, perverse, inexcusably cruel, deeply irrational, and essentially wicked” (p. 208).Readers who concede Hart’s animating premises, which are evident from the start, may find his arguments persuasive. For a very different reading of Hart’s universalist outlook, one more tethered to church-historical fact and confessional logic and therefore supportive of a hermeneutic more likely to grant Scripture the say it deserves in this discussion, I recommend the terse essay accessible by searching for “Michael McClymond, opiate of the theologians” on Google.