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Cricket in India has evolved much beyond its fundamental definition as a game or form of entertainment in the present century. The liberalization process in the 1990s, followed by the drastic social changes in the country, impacted the game, leading it to acquire new meanings as cultural text. Currently, Indian cricket forms part of collective enjoyment, forming people's habitus and playing a central ideological role in the politics of ethnonationalism. This article attempts to analyze Indian Cricket using Slavoj Zizek's concept of "national Thing," to critically understand its potential to evoke hyper‐nationalism in the Indian polity. The concept of "national Thing," proposed by Zizek, postulates that the recourse to nationalism can cause a pleasure‐in‐pain situation and evoke extreme "enjoyment" (jouissance), which functions on the idea of sudden sense of loss. Drawing insights from this, this paper theoretically investigates sport‐induced nationalism in cricket in the backdrop of escalating neo‐nationalist sentiments in India. Additionally, the article expounds on how cricket becomes a "lost Thing" in Indian popular culture by critically analyzing the Indian film Kai Po Che (2013), in which cricket emerges as a social and political entity, intervening with the lives of ordinary youths in India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This first article in the 2024 World Affairs special issue examines the Narendra Modi regime in India. Often acerbic political rhetoric is attached to official policies of the regime, creating fear and hopelessness within sections of the population. In this study, five sets of political activities of the government are evaluated. First, cultural authoritarianism became apparent with complicity toward "cow vigilantism," slapping sedition charges against those showing political dissent, banning the history books of selected progressives, and stereotyping sections of the left and liberals as antinationals. Second, the demonetization policy was implemented without adequately following the economic protocols of the state. Third, the Jammu and Kashmir Reorganization Bill indicates the thwarting of democratic and federalist ideas. Fourth, the Citizenship Amendment Act and the National Register of Citizens exercise in Assam demonstrate the communal‐fascist worldview of the regime in profiling population groups. Finally, the sloppy handling of the COVID‐19 pandemic and the new Information Technology rules show the government's callous approach toward science and privacy. By analyzing such political activities, the article points out that majoritarian religious nationalism, coupled with authoritarianism, has been the ideological expression of the Modi regime, coexisting with both state surveillance and electoral democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Against the backdrop of India's 2019 Islamophobic Citizenship Amendment Act, this article is based on ethnographic research with young Muslim women from Aligarh which aimed to show that their narratives of displacement and exclusion from citizenship inspired their search for belonging and enabled them to reinscribe spaces with their own, marginalised, but nonetheless real, projects of belonging. From exclusion and debasement springs new imagination of belonging: this is my finding. Drawing on intersectional feminist writings, postcolonial and critical Muslim studies, I propose that Muslim women's geographies become forms of contestation of the national project producing non-citizens. In this context, I trace the interconnections between physical and spiritual geographies to show us how Muslim women continue to carve space for themselves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the motivations and actions of Indian Americans who actively oppose Hindutva, that is, a Hindu nationalist vision for India. Diaspora activists who advocate in favour of progressive values for India tend to be underreported in the media and underanalysed in scholarship. The following study addresses this gap. Based on public records, interviews with activist leaders, and participant‐observation, the paper demonstrates how anti‐Hindutva diaspora actors identify and leverage political opportunities in order to engage in moral signalling in local, national and global spaces. By shining a light on ongoing counternarratives to Hindutva, this study highlights contestations within Indian‐origin communities and challenges monolithic portrayals of diaspora politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tracing the shifting historical and contemporary discourses of self‐representation among upper caste American Hindu immigrants, this paper reflects upon the rise of diaspora "Hindutva Democrats" in the post‐2020 American political landscape. What makes "Hindutva Democrats" a peculiar political embodiment is their manipulative use of the language of social justice for addressing racism in America while downplaying, if not outright refusing to acknowledge, glaring human rights abuses against minorities (for issues such as casteism and Islamophobia) in India and in the Indian diaspora. Together, these confounding and inconsistent political stances illuminate the problem of the neoliberalization of calls for racial justice, amplified by narratives of American exceptionalism and its favorable capitalist ties to India in the contemporary political landscape. This analysis of the Hindutva Democratic movement illuminates the ways in which performances of race, caste, and racialization are embedded in historical, institutional, and gendered ideological projects across borders. These performances create insidious impediments toward the achievement of the global human rights which are foundational to sustainable peace. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Chapter 3 turns to the Utkal Sammillani, a pan-Odia forum created in 1903 to improve the welfare of Odia-speaking communities and push for better representation, which eventually evolved into a demand for amalgamating all Odia-speaking areas into one administration. Contrary to the overstated title, I Language and the Making of Modern India i is a comprehensive and important study of the regional Odia language movement and the creation of Odisha (formerly Orissa), the first province organised on a linguistic basis under British rule. The author points to a concerted intellectual effort to write a history of Odisha which imagined the Odia-speaking community and non-Odia Adivasi communities as long existing "side by side" but with a clear hierarchy which justified their lesser position under a liberal, paternalistic Odisha. [Extracted from the article]