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This essay briefly discusses accounts of violence in India before reviewing three recent books that examine the place of violence in Indian political thought. All three books provide insights into the minds of some of the thinkers who have shaped modern India. While two of the authors focus on Mahatma Gandhi and V. D. Savarkar, respectively, the third is more wide-ranging in focus. All three books are important contributions to the study of violence in India, but also a reminder that India's founding figures remain the objects of contestation and appropriation by political parties and movements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the past few years, India has witnessed cataclysmic incidents of intermittent violence under the banner of Hindutva. Hindutva is a political ideology which works on extremist agenda to establish a homogenized cultural hegemony by focussing on exclusivist interests of Hindu majoritarian. It advocates revisionist attitude towards Hindu mythical figures by projecting them as prototypes of hypermasculinity to coax common Hindus with pseudo-patriotism. This article discusses on how Hindutva uses the principle of masculinity as its conceptual framework and its ramification on the socio-cultural fabric of India. It also deliberates on the fundamental essence of bhakti tradition, which largely contests Hindutva on ideological plane. Furthermore, it demonstrates the significance of bhakti literature in the present social context by alluding to the rich repository of saint poets whose verses critique Hindutva with a message of humanism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article is an attempt to unpack the famous "Hindutva verdict" of 1995, by specifically paying attention to the construction of culture and its relationship with Hinduism in India. The verdict opens up an avenue to think afresh about the relationship between the state and religion in the context of Hinduism, supporting me to argue that the question of (religious) authority for Hinduism is distinctly connected to secular sovereignty unlike in the case of Islam or Christianity. This in turn suggests that there is no authoritative distinction between Hinduism and Hindutva since these discourses are the products of the state's ongoing effort to define Hinduism as the context demands. The practice of the state in authorizing acts, attitudes, norms, and sensibilities that are deemed Hindu is encased in the construct of culture and its various enunciations such as legal and rhetoric. One must attend to the genealogy of culture in order to understand the nature of authority in Hinduism as well as the form of sovereignty recognized and exercised in India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following the Indian Supreme Court's verdict allowing the construction of a Rām Mandir at the site of the former Babri Masjid in 2019, Hindu nationalists have put renewed pressure on the North Indian city of Mathura. There, the seventeenth-century Shahi Idgah shares a boundary wall with a temple complex associated with the birth site of the deity Kṛṣṇa. Between 2019 and 2023, at least nine court cases were filed to remove the idgah from the vicinity of the Kṛṣṇa Janmabhūmi. With the future of a contentious religious site unfolding in the courts, I adopt an ethnographic perspective to assess the consequences of political stake claiming in the name of religion within the city of Mathura. I argue that the very threat of transforming a religiously plural landscape into a distinctively Hindu territory has had material consequences for those who live in Mathura. This situation demonstrates how rhetorical and spatial erasure mutually reinforce one another within contemporary Hindutva projects, whereby Muslim sacred territory in India becomes progressively more difficult to access, both conceptually and on the ground. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides an in-depth exploration of the relationship between Hinduism and Hindu nationalism. It discusses the historical development of Hindu nationalism and its connection to the categorization of Hinduism as a religion. The article also examines the role of key figures in shaping Hindu nationalism and the concept of a Hindu-led nation. It further delves into the complexities of Hindu nationalism, including its relationship with other religions and its impact on the Hindu diaspora. Additionally, the text discusses various movements within Hinduism and their representation in organizations, as well as the influence of Hinduism in America. It also touches on the historical context of Hindu-Muslim conflicts and the conflation of Hindu nationalism and Indian nationalism. The work of scholars and filmmakers in relation to Hinduism is also explored. Overall, the article provides a nuanced perspective on the complexities of Hinduism and its intersections with culture, politics, and society. [Extracted from the article]

Vegetarians developed transnational ties between India and Europe, sharing ideals of purity that also contributed to the formation of today's Hindu nationalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hindu nationalism operates on a global scale today. Evinced by the transnational networks of the Sangh Parivar and the replication of strategies such as amending textbooks and patriotic rewriting of history, politics and discourse of Hindu nationalism are not solely contained to the territorial boundary of the nation. In this globalized battle for and against Hindu nationalism, the United States of America serves as an important site. In light of this, this article puts together existing scholarship on diasporic Hindu nationalism with late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century deterritorial history of Indian nationalism to present a broader framework for historicizing Indian activism in the US. It argues that while long-distance Hindu nationalism in the US cannot be traced before the 1970s, examining the early experiences of Indian activists in the US offers useful insights with which to evaluate the ongoing battles of Hindu nationalism in the US and opens another field of enquiry: Hindutva's counterpublic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This commentary offers a reflection on the triangular interactive relationship between Hindutva, gurus and media. It suggests that Hindu nationalists understand gurus to be a specific form of valued Hindu cultural good, which helps to explain mediatised activist attempts to defend gurus from legal and media scrutiny, and historicises the theme of guru domination, caste politics and Hindutva through the optics of matter and media, exploring both the mass remediation of Brahmanical guruship models that attended Hindutva's rise in the 1990s and the oppositional response it provoked, which we term 'the subaltern counter-publicity of the guru'. It discloses how Hindutva is itself structurally composed of guru logics at different scales; it embodies a kind of 'fractal guruship'. However, if Hindutva mediates principles of guruship, we also see how a multitude of public gurus mediates principles of Hindutva. This 'bi-instrumentalism' of Hindu nationalism and some gurus is witnessed in the instances we describe of gurus—and the idea of India as a guru—being used as a means of branding in order to convey and normalise the 'Hindutva idea of India'. We suggest, in light of the frequent mutual mediation of gurus and Hindutva, that continued investment by devotees and commentators in gurus as figures embodying hope and the promise of post-communal amity can aptly be described using Berlant's evocative phrase 'cruel optimism'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using the figure of the ethnic Pathan/Pashtun as a trope in South Asian culture, this essay provides a genealogical account of the modern emergence of Hindu–Muslim "religious" conflicts played along the lines of nation-thinking in the Indian subcontinent. This modern phenomenon begins in the late 18th century, with the orientalist transcriptions of a vast conglomerate of diverse Indic faiths into a Brahminical–Sanskritic Hinduism and a similar telescoping of complex Islamic intellectual traditions into what we can call a "Mohammedanism" overdetermined by Islamic law. As such, both these transcriptions had to fulfill certain Christological expectations of western anthropology in order to emerge as "religions" and "world religions", that is, when, as Talal Asad has shown, "religion" was constructed as an anthropological category within the parameters of European secular introspection and the modern expansion of empire. Both Hinduism and Islam therefore had to have a book, a prophetic figure, a doctrinal core, and a singular compendium of laws. Upper caste Sanskritic traditions therefore dominated Hinduism, and a legal supremacist position dominated the modern reckoning of Islam at the expense of philosophy, metaphysics, poesis, and varieties of artistic self-making. Together, the two phenomena also created the historical illusion (now industrialized) that Brahminism always defined Hindu societies and the Sharia was always a total fact of Islam. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hindutva is an extreme-wing policy, it’s grounded in Hindu religious and nationalist beliefs. It considers Muslims and Christians as ‘others’, and it rejuvenates its own Hindu religious myths. Under the BJP reign, the meteoric rise of Hindu nationalism has jolted India’s secular democracy and pushed India out of its secular federative lines. Their policies are deified under the ideology of RSS, the rightists desire to assert a Hindu Rashtra, under a Hindu rigid constitution. It has given rise to religious violence and divergence from the actual roots of Hinduism. The saffronization movement had cost severe damage to its multi-faith society and secular diversity. The study is historical in nature, it follows a qualitative research approach and with a focus on the descriptive method. It further addresses the political implications of Hindutva in India, following the extremist policies of BJP during Mod’s regime, and it also sheds light on the politicization of religion for greater political gain, under which India’s democracy has declined to electoral autocracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Zeitschrift für Religionswissenschaft is the property of De Gruyter and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following the partition of the Indian subcontinent in 1947, the sociopolitical rivalry between Hindu religious nationalists and secular democratic nationalists that arose during the independence struggles, and whose intolerance precipitated the conflict, persists to this day. Following an extended period of dominance as one of the two major political parties in India, the Indian National Congress Party (INC), which espouses Indian secularism rooted in Gandhian socialism, social democracy, secularism, and democratic socialism, has been at the helm of Indian politics for approximately three decades. However, Hindu nationalism will soon supplant INC's political preeminence, which forms the foundation of the Bharatiya Janata Party's (BJP) political ideology. This article aims to shed light on the voting patterns of supporters of radical Hindu political parties over a three-decade period (1980-2014). Additionally, it will examine the impact of globalization on the dynamics of interaction between radical Hindus and adherents of other religious minorities in India, including Islam and Christianity. The primary research inquiry of the article is as follows: To what extent has globalization influenced the voting patterns of radical Hindu political party supporters? Furthermore, what impact has globalization had on the dynamics of interaction between adherents of Hinduism and other faiths in India? Its hypotheses assert that Hindu radicalism is shifting toward moderation due to globalization. In addition, individuals are distancing themselves from radical Hindu parties, and these parties are losing their political base as a result of the effects of globalization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers civilizational politics at the interface between nationalism and internationalism. It does this by focusing on some key trends in India's engagements with UNESCO and its flagship conventions for culture. The article builds on existing scholarship regarding the political appropriation of key religious and heritage sites within India by critically examining how Hinduism is presented to UNESCO and other organizations as a religious and civilizational heritage for global recognition and endorsement. We argue that UNESCO's programmes and conventions are being co-opted via a rewriting of history and in the creation of heritage imaginaries of a Hindu nation. From there, the discussion extends previous critiques regarding the conjoining of Hinduism to a Harappan civilization heritage by showing how this geographically extends outwards via a programme of Indian Ocean diplomacy conceived around environmental and historical connectivities. In pulling these various threads together, the article demonstrates the ways in which Hindu civilizational discourses circulate at the international level in seemingly benign and banal ways, and, yet, simultaneously advance the domestic cultural politics now familiar to the Hindutva movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In view of the growing popularity of Hindu nationalism in India, the purpose here is to ask if Hinduism and Hindutva can be considered as separate entities. In recent times especially under the BJP-led government, India, is witnessing the rise of a regime that negates and deliberately silences all non-majoritarian and dissenting voices. Its sole agenda is to drive Hindutva politics home and for doing so it aims at turning India into a Hindu state built around upper caste Brahmanical patriarchal ideology. Hindutva politics dismisses plurality inherent in orthopraxy and imposes a singular explanation of Hindu philosophy based on caste oppression and communalism. This paper argues that under the current regime, India is witnessing cultural homogenization and Saffronization of civil society with the final goal of normalization of Islamophobia. The paper ends with the observation that such systematic hate mongering is largely possible through media propaganda. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A protean notion around the conceptualization of Hindutva and Hinduism has long been a matter of debate among scholars interested in the politics of religion and the religion of politics in India. In other words, a large section of the TV media in India seems to apply Swamy's ([6]) definition of Hindutva as their point of reference of Hinduism and views no difference in the two concepts. Decoupling Hindutva from Hinduism The books could be broadly divided into two parts, with the first attempting to define the Hindutva/Hinduism conundrums and the second appealing to the authors' political constituents. [Extracted from the article]

The article discusses the Hindutva Nationalist project of building a homogeneous India. Topics include the problem that arises for Hindutva nationalists, factor that created the ground for Hindutva to function on an emotional level on topics around Rama and Hinduism, and importance of the homogenisation of Hinduism in the name of Ram as critical study.

Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC 5 Patton, Laurie L. 2019. THE LARGE-SCALE campaigns orchestrated by Hindu supremacist groups against academics working on South Asia, and especially on Hinduism, are hard to ignore. [Extracted from the article]

This essay addresses canonisation accounts of the medieval Muslim saint Hazrat Sharafuddin Hyderabadi. According to a contemporary text, a Hindu deity was believed to have been jettisoned from the saint's dargah, causing communal unrest in the Deccan. How can a Muslim saint be enshrined through offence in a Hindu environment, and how does this create a discourse of both rifts and bridges between Hinduism and Islam in contemporary India? The analysis traces the interdependence between the Muslim and Hindu communities and suggests a more nuanced reading than positions advanced in the current political climate and in recent legislation, which consider them to be irreconcilable socio-religious systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the Indo-Caribbean diaspora's performance of vernacular representations of Hinduism and ethnic identity, as influenced by a global pan-Hindu agenda of India's current nationalist government. Using the case of Guyana, we consider dynamics between religion and South Asian politics by which agents disseminate pan-Hinduism, and how such avatars of Hindu performativity are affected by historical ethno-racial tensions. We contend that while the diaspora needs their 'homeland' to sustain their memories and heritage in their resettled state, the 'homeland' in turn can manipulate diasporic needs for migrant identity to advance its own foreign-policy agendas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Analysing Indian protagonists' strategies at the 15th World Vegetarian Congress in India in 1957, this article argues that they brought together Hindu nationalism and internationalism. By constructing non-violence and vegetarianism as a national heritage, they characterised India as a moral superpower above the divisions of the Cold War and endowed it with a global civilising mission. On the other hand, they tried to win international support to influence the politics of the Indian government, opposing parts of the Five-Year Plans and Nehru's politics of secularism. Moreover, by insisting on India as a vegetarian country, they erased Islam from Indian history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Decolonial Horizons / Horizontes Decoloniales is the property of Pluto Journals and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This essay examines common representations of religious minorities in Hindi popular cinema within the context of dominant post-Independence Indian religious and political ideologies - from a religiously pluralist secular socialist framework to a Hindu nationalist late-capitalist orientation. Since the 1990s, Hindi popular film, the Hindi sāmājik, or social, has been understood to be a legitimate conveyor of middle-class Indian values worthy of critical interpretation. This essay thus begins by examining how that legitimacy occurred and how the "Bollywood" film simultaneously became legitimate in the eyes of the Indian public and fit for discursive analysis. Yet long before the heady days of economic liberalization, ascendant Hindu nationalism, and global Indian diaspora, particular notions of Hindu dharma (variously if imperfectly translated as "cosmic order", "duty", "law", "religion") undergirded Hindi popular cinema structurally and topically. Having explained this broader dhārmik, or religious context, the essay turns to shifting representations of religious minorities, particularly Muslims, Sikhs, and Christians, by recourse to several popular Hindi films from Indian Independence to the present. Not only do newer films depict troubling representations of the religious Other, but Hindutva ascendance forces us to reexamine past films cognizant of what is to come. Reengagement with earlier films force us to note that ideological inconsistencies, tensions, and contradictions have long been manifest on the silver screen, particularly with regard to religious minorities. The essay concludes by arguing that South Asian religio-cultural traditions in all their diversity provide filmmakers with a nearly endless treasury, would that their depths be plumbed. Meanwhile, younger filmmakers are taking Hindi popular cinema in encouraging directions, with newer films reflecting the lives, artistry, and sheer impatience of India's younger generations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rashtriya Swamysavek Sangh, commonly known as RSS, is a Hindu volunteer organization with its branches and millions of members in entire country. Its violent extremist approach and ideologyis an emerging major challenge not only within India but is likely to affect some of its neighbors as well. RSS with number of affiliated organizations like Viswanathan Hindu Prasad (VHP), Bajrangdal, Shiv Sena and Bhartia Janta Party (BJP) are stretching its muscles to discipline Muslims and Christians minorities. All these organizations are collaborating and working for a majority Hindu nation state with no place for minorities, either they have to convert to Hinduism or leave the country. Indian Citizenship amendment bill2019(ICA, 2019) is an effort to encourage Hindus, Sikhs, Jains, Christians, and Parsi from neighboring Muslim countries to opt for Indian citizenship less Muslims. National Registration Citizenship (NRC, 2019) is another effort to push out minorities mostly Muslims and Christians either for conversions, staying in detention camps or leaving India. A list confirming citizenship issued on August 31, 2019 has left 1.9 million, mostly Muslim as non-citizen in Assam. Prime Minister of India, Mr. Narendra Damodardas Modi has been a staunch follower of the ideology of Hindutva advocated byM.S. Golwalker (Pilai, 2017) and Vinayak Damodar Savarkar (Veer Savarkar Bio, 2019) in their books on Hinduness. Both Golwalker and Veer Savarkar are considered actual brains behind entire philosophy of Hinduism. Mr. Modi joined RSS in 1970 and has gradually risen in ranks thus deeply indoctrinated with Hindutva philosophy, dominance of majority Hindu and reversion to Hinduism by Muslims and Christians. Revoking of article 370 and 35 A by the BJP government has long been on its agenda. By dividing and making sole largest Muslim state as part of Union territory is being taken as great Hindu victory and revenge of so many years of Muslims rule. This article shall make an attempt to provide insight, understand the nature of contemporary challenges of rising violent extremism, revoking of article 370, locking down of Jammu and Kashmir, it intended aims and objectives, manipulation of governance and political arena, spreading of hate, intolerance, bigotry in a wrap agenda of Hindu nationalism. Article will review its impact and implication for Pakistan and a way forward. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What are the new characteristics of Hindu nationalism—now in a phase when Hindutva logics are percolating into various local practices, in India and in diaspora, and now that the BJP has assumed electoral office? This short 'Post Script' essay uses the cases represented in this special issue on 'neo-Hindutva' to think through overarching themes that distinguish present expressions of political Hinduism. I argue that while the vernacularization of Hindutva continues to generate new expressions that variously modulate or adapt classic Sangh Parivar positions in specific local contexts, the wide dispersion of Hindutva logics and the wider tendency to use political frameworks for almost all social affairs is generating other responses. Most notably, Hindutva vernacularization increasingly involves seeking out apolitical forms of politics itself: transcendent logics and neutralizing frameworks that position Hindutva as outside of the usual political corruptions of the modern Indian State. While such forms have a long history in the subcontinent, I argue for greater attentiveness to apolitical aspirations as these coalesce in what are usually politically overdetermined contexts. The pull of the apolitical cannot be cynically dismissed as disingenuous or merely a veiled politics, or we risk fueling rather than addressing the various dimensions of its evolving critique. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Secularism seems to require separation between religion and State. Regarding India, it would be better to speak of 'equidistance' between State and religious denominations. Nonetheless a 'balanced treatment' towards the religions leaves the question open as to what form that equidistance should take. This is the reason of some contradictions in today's Indian social and political life. It is likely that without the Moghul and British domination Hinduism would not have acquired a militant identity. It was the 'epiphany' of well-armed, powerful 'Others' (Muslim, Christian or secular) which generated frustration and fear to such an extent that a religious nationalism (Hindutva) was born. Nehru and the Left of the Congress Party leadership thought that modernity would overcome religion, which is a remnant of the past. They were confident that a political culture based on pluralism and tolerance would become the foundations of the new society. This is exactly what Hindu Nationalism takes issue with: the 'pseudo-seculars' project of building the national identity without Hinduism or against Hinduism. Hindutva asserts that Hinduism is the basis of the Indian civilization. The Hindu ethos is the soul of the nation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay deals with the rise of the right-wing Bharatiya Janta Party (BJP) to power in the 2014 National Elections, a party that is fundamentally anti-secularist and anti-democratic whose aim is to convert secular and democratic India into a Hindu Kingdom. It deals with the crisis of secularism in India and the Revolutionary Marxist response to this crisis. The methodology that it follows is the Marxist one. The leitmotiv of this paper is rather startling—Marx was not a secularist as one has hitherto imagined. It claims that a new theoretical problematic has to be sought in understanding the dilemma haunting secularism: the discourse and practice of secularism are important, and yet Marx (the exemplary humanist and revolutionary) was not a secularist as one imagines it. What we have done is a terrain shift in our study of secularism, especially on the question of the thesis of the separation of religion and the state. This essay consequently makes a distinction between ‘secularism as we know it’, or liberal secularism, and communist secularism. Besides this, the essay grounds the discourse in material social formations in India that are determined by the Asiatic mode of production and along with this mode, the caste formations that are inherent in the Indic variant of the Asiatic mode of production. By and large, the entire discourses of secularism and the rise of fascism in India determined by the ideologies of liberalism and Stalinism ignore the caste question. Thus along with the caste question, the Asiatic mode of production is also brought in, a mode of production that mainstream Marxists have almost ignored, thereby implanting Eurocentric understandings of secularism in India. We thus discover certain methodological guidelines where we develop new terms and conditions to understand an authentic ‘people's secularism’. This essay deals with the question of secularism in India as rooted in the conflict between ‘secularism from above’ that was grafted by Jawaharlal Nehru and the upper caste elites in the freedom movement against British colonialism and ‘religious politics from above’ that formed the contours of elite politics in India since 1947. In contrast to ‘secularism from above’ (or liberal secularism) and ‘religious politics from above’, this essay argues for ‘secularism from below', which shall serve as the revolutionary critique of Indian fascism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper re-evaluates certain core understandings of Hindu nationalism in Britain through the analysis of a disputed 2006 art exhibition in London. It considers the two main protagonists objecting to the M. F. Husain show: the representative umbrella organisation, the Hindu Forum of Britain, and the web- and protest-based group, Hindu Human Rights. In particular, the paper considers the relationship between these groups, the government, and the Hindu nationalist movement in India. The central role played by performative tropes of outrage and offence in the public representation of Hinduism is explored. It is argued that a reconceptualisation of diasporic Hindutva is required. Firstly, whilst still connected to India in various ways, Hindu nationalism in Britain has outgrown the institutional and ideological boundaries of the Sangh Parivar. It is proposed that these idiosyncratic inflections of transnational Hindutva might be termed ‘neo-Hindutva’. Secondly, it is suggested that the M. F. Husain protests, and subsequent activities of the Hindu Forum, indicate that Hindutva has become mainstreamed and normalised in the UK. Whilst elements of this narrative are distinctly domestic, we must also understand the transnational context which is intrinsically linked, discursively and practically, to India. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A film criticism is presented of the 2001 film "Revolt: A Love Story" ("Gadar: Ek Prem Katha"), starring Sunny Deol and Amisha Patel. Topics discussed include the film's portrayal of Indian identity and Hindi values and nationalism, the Indian motion picture industry, also known as Bollywood, and the depictions of Muslims in the film.

Swami Vivekananda has been recognised as one of the most influential but arguably controversial Hindu gurus of the last two centuries. In this year of the 150th anniversary of Vivekananda's birth, this article will examine the concerns and approaches that have come increasingly to characterise etic scholarship concerning Vivekananda's life and legacy. Referring as a starting point to an earlier historiographical review completed in the early 1990s, the article then explores how scholarly studies have revisited the question of the nature of Vivekananda's influence on Hindu nationalism (Hindutva) and have come to give greater prominence to his role in the globalisation of yoga. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Some Hindu immigrants to America - those who subscribe to Hindutva values - desire full rights and recognition in their adopted homeland even as they simultaneously demand that so-called "migrants" to India (that is, Muslims and Christians whose communities have flourished in India for hundreds of years) acquiesce to their vision of India as a "Hindu state." In an American racial landscape that structurally privileges whites, I argue that the cultural categorization of Hindu immigrants into a "lesser-than-whites" minority has only served to fuel the growth of Hindu supremacist groups in the United States. In this article, I draw on fieldwork with two Hindu American summer camps in order to show that some Hindu immigrants misrecognize and repress their own current alienation in a manner that has subsequently aggravated latent antipathies towards Muslim and Christian communities in India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay elucidates ideologically-inspired interpretations of the South Asian archeological record, particularly by those called Hindutvādins, and those who write about (and against) them. I first survey briefly the chief points in the history of archaeology in examining the Indus Valley Civilization. Next, I describe some of the major controversies that reflect claims of Hindutva pseudoarchaeology in the South Asian context. Throughout, I illustrate the increasingly virulent interactions between Hindutva proponents, indigenist theorists, and academic interpreters, and what these debates foretell of the future of Indus Valley studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gujarat has been profoundly marked by its location at the centre of traditional trade networks which, I have argued elsewhere, has strengthened the position of its merchant communities relative to other parts of India. Here I propose that merchant religion, with its stress on purity, has displaced folk Shaktism as well as Brahminic ritual among Gujarat's wider population, to form the core of a modern Gujarati Hinduism, which includes Hindutva. This development, I hold, has been imbricated in the spread of bourgeois culture, making for a particular religious colouring of modernity in Gujarat, and contrasting with the ‘secularism’ which—perhaps exaggeratedly—has been held to characterise Occidental modernity. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A revised reprint of the essay "The Politics of Hindu 'Tolerance'" by the author and published in the Summer 2008 issue of "Journal of Contemporary Thought" is presented. The essay discusses the ways in which Hinduism operates in India at the political level and its engagement with religious tolerance and intolerance. Topics include Hindutva politics and its association with religious leaders, the difference between Hindutva and Hinduism, and secularism in India.

This article is the first of three in a series surveying research on Hindutva (Hindu nationalism or political hinduism), focusing on seminal articulations that set the stage for later debates, and define the directions of later politics. I review accounts of hindutva's ideological origins, from the pre-independence racialist articulations to the humanist emphases of post-independence years, to the strident culturalism of the 1990s. 'Hindutva' is formed through these successive phases of ideological assertion, as much as it precipitates and participates in a wider culture of identitarian assertions. The second essay of three focuses on prominent rhetorical constructions deployed to address hindutva polemically, and the third on hinduva as praxis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]