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This article analyzes how Hindu nationalists employ fantasy narratives to counteract resistance, with a particular focus on narratives of 'motherhood' and 'pseudoscience'. It does so by first introducing a conceptual discussion of the relationship between fantasy narratives, ontological insecurity, gender, and anti-science as a more general interrelationship characterizing pre- and post-COVID-19 far-right societies and leaders, such as India. It then moves on to discuss such fantasy narratives in the case of India by highlighting how this has played out in two cases of Hindu nationalist imaginings: that of popular culture, with a specific focus on the town Varanasi and the film Water (produced in 2000), and that of the COVID-19 pandemic and the emerging crisis and resistance that it has entailed. Extracts of interviews are included to illustrate this resistance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC 10 Doniger, Wendy. Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC 29 Rambachan, Anantanand. Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC 30 Redden, Elizabeth. Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC 7 Chaturvedi, Vinayak. [Extracted from the article]

Two US-based Hindutva organizations led the charge against the DGH: Hindu American Foundation (HAF)[1] and Coalition of Hindus of North America (CoHNA). Footnotes 1 Founded in 2003, HAF is a US-based Hindutva organization that claims to speak on behalf of all US Hindus. HAF claims to speak for Hindu students, positioning them as a precarious racialized minority at risk for widespread harm from the DGH conference while ignoring any discussion of Hindu nationalist violence toward minorities. [Extracted from the article]

This paper intervenes in critical socio-legal/post-colonial scholarship on human rights directed at how religion is constitutive of race and shapes who and what is regarded as 'human' and entitled to rights. It focuses on the Indian post-colony and legal persecution of the Tablighi Jamaat, a global, quietest Islamic movement, by the Hindu Right government during the Covid pandemic. It analyses how religion structures race in Hindu nationalist discourse to transform the Muslim into a perpetual outsider and an existential and epistemic threat to the Hindu nation and rights of the Hindu racial majority. The discussion connects to the epistemic anxiety generated by the alternative worldviews presented by this racialised 'Other' that shape legal consciousness and rights interventions globally. In complicating how anti-Muslim racism and Islamophobia are integral to the transnational histories of race and race-making, the analysis triggers a rethinking of human rights interventions and the epistemological closures they enact. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A recent dimension of India's nation-branding project, by which it aims to attract investment, trade, human resources, and tourists to the country, has been a focus on a 'green' India as a global leader in sustainable development. As part of this strategy, messages aimed at a national and external audience are aligned, and a line is drawn between the country's putative ecologically sensitive past and a green future. Such messages highlight selective, sanitised, and idealised Hindu texts and praxis related to the environment as evidence of India's innate ecological sensitivity. The environment thus becomes a domain for the permeation of a seemingly apolitical strand of Hindutva rhetoric, which emphasises the civilisational wisdom of Indian (coded as Hindu) thought and presents it for consumption by national and global audiences. In this article, using anti-plastics discourses as a lens, I investigate the cultural politics of this emerging stream of Hindutva-linked 'ecotraditionalism'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Administrative "success" or "failure" during the pandemic are hard to assess given uncertainties both of criteria and of data. But there can be no doubt about the mishandling of the pandemic at crucial junctures by the Indian government, or about the culpability of prime minister Narendra Modi himself. He has this in common with other "strongmen" of contemporary world politics, but Modi was unusually successful in turning the events of the pandemic to reinforce his dominance. The immediate political factors that influenced the Indian response had to do with political leadership and with the "decisionism" that characterised Modi's actions, but in the context of the pursuit of the goals of Hindu nationalism. This article explains the responses of the Indian government drawing on a framework based on the comparative analysis of Baum and her co-authors. It shows how the events of the pandemic reflect on India's politics and on the character of the Indian state, using a state-in-society approach suggested by the interlocking arguments of Migdal, Mann and Evans. This highlights and explains the very different responses of the major states of the country. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the Communist and Congress Parties continue their downfall in West Bengal, two parties relying heavily on identity politics are entrenching their positions as the main political forces of the state: the Trinamool Congress with its pro-Bengali discourse and the Bharatiya Janata Party with its pro-Hindu discourse. Yet, we know little about how the political mobilization of these different regional and religious identities interact in potentially conflicting manners and inform political choices, especially among groups and individuals who identify with both. This paper interrogates the relationship between regional identity, religious identity and political opinions in the state of West Bengal. Backing its conclusions with the results of a qualitative study investigating multi-ethnic Hindu religious organizations, this article argues that, although strongly identifying as a Hindu favours the endorsement of Hindu Nationalist political ideas, identification to the Bengali identity is a stronger determinant of one's vote. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The new politics of violence, exclusion and humiliation which is being played out in various religious spaces and idioms in India today cannot be understood without reference to the tactics of harassment by sample and tyranny by example in Narendra Modi's India. The article tries to outline the essential operative means of this authoritarian agenda. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Has the consolidation of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) as the dominant party at the national level since the 2014 Lok Sabha election affected internal security outcomes in India? This question assumes particular significance because of the primacy accorded to the use of force in the BJP's counter-insurgency (COIN) strategy. Using sub-national data on insurgency-related fatalities from 2005–2021, I examine whether states where the BJP received the largest share of votes in the 2014 Lok Sabha election subsequently experienced any significant changes in the pattern of fatalities. Implementing a difference-in-difference econometric specification, I show that the BJP states experienced a relatively sharper decline in security force fatalities from pre-2014 compared to non-BJP states. However, there was no such effect on civilian fatalities or the total number of insurgency-related incidents. Taken together, these findings show that the greater thrust towards militarism in COIN strategy under the BJP, has, paradoxically, increased the security of military/police personnel involved in COIN operations, without commensurate changes in the security of those whom they are mandated to defend. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

India's courts have proven cautious or ineffectual in protecting refugees and asylum seekers in India against refoulement. This article examines the courts' approaches to the prospective removal of persons at risk of harm if removed from India and identifies a contradiction between the breadth of India's constitutional guarantee of "life and liberty" and its courts' narrow and inconsistent approach to questions of refoulement. This article argues that the right to non-refoulement has solely been recognized in India as a "procedural" right (merely requiring that persons at risk of persecution on return to their countries of origin be removed through "proper" procedures), and that this approach is unclear, inconsistent and unsatisfactory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lala Lajpat Rai is increasingly viewed in historiography as a "Hindu nationalist" with a strong affinity with Savarkarite Hindutva. This article demonstrates that during the Khilafat movement, Lajpat Rai articulated a secular Indian nationalism that was sensitive to Muslim religiosity and Indian Muslims' extraterritorial sympathies toward the caliphate and the Muslim world. Pigeonholing the entire thought of Lajpat Rai as "Hindu nationalism" obscures a historical-intellectual juncture when a Hindu political figure like him enthusiastically supported pan-Islamism as necessary for Indian nationalism. This article complicates scholarship that portrays Hindu responses to the Khilafat movement as consisting solely of fear and counter-consolidation. More importantly, by unveiling Rai's Khilafat-era nationalism, it uncovers the intellectual and political possibility of firmly holding a Hindu identity and articulating conceptions of Indian nationhood that are at ease with Islam and the wider Muslim world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the political deification of a so-called demon Mahishasur in hegemonic Hindu myths. The Mahishasur movement is a social movement for caste equality headed by indigenous and oppressed-caste groups against the hegemonic upper caste Hindu storyworlds which dominate Indian politics, society, and culture. In this article, I use data collected through participant observation and long interviews to focus on the way political organisers select and create icons for this movement, how the participants in the movement behave around these icons, and finally what terms do they use to understand their own practices. I use three related aspects of the movement – icons, rituals, and discourse – to bring out the emic concepts and practices around political deification used in the Mahishasur movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the rising prominence of subterranean caste antagonism within the ideology of Hindutva within the Indian political landscape. It primarily analyses social media-based content like memes, posts, images, comments and other features to understand the contemporary processes of political deification of the Hindu god, Lord Parshuram. This article sees Parshuram's popular emergence as a political icon as reflective of a masculine, militant face of contemporary Brahminic assertion. The article argues that, even though the ideological mandate of Hindutva apparently proposes a unity amongst its diverse sections, Parshuram's contemporary politicization in digital social media reflects the dominant caste antagonisms within. In the process, this article engages with the complex relationship between the social structures of masculinity, religious majority and caste hierarchy, and study how they affect region-specific political consolidations in contemporary North India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The bovine has been the cause of conflict in the Indian sub-continent for the past few centuries owing to religious and cultural sentiments associated with it. This apparent irreconcilable conflict is localised in the binary of religious mannerism espoused by the religious groups in northern India, which is known as India's cow belt. Such contradictions have caused bitter riots and conflicts resulting in social unrest in mainland India with spiralling effects spilling over to other regions. Although this issue has become a determiner in controlling electoral politics in some Indian states that affected the rise in Hindutva politics, in the case of Assam both cow-politics and Hindutva sentiments have had little effect. This paper proposes to examine this hypothesis by analysing Himanshu Prasad Das' Assamese feature film Goru (2021) through the lens of cultural nationalism. A study of the film within the framework of Assamese popular culture shall help us understand the implication behind the rejection of Hindutva ideology in this peripheral region. The primary focus of this paper is to read how cow politics and Hindutva have failed to make inroads in Assam's composite culture despite Bharatiya Janata Party's thumping victory in Assembly polls in 2016. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I study a set of late-colonial kantha quilts as sites of recuperation. In the first section I situate kantha and its shifting meanings within the wider field of cultural productions in nineteenth-century bengal. I argue that through kantha embroideries upper caste women participated in Hindu cultural nationalism while recuperating a sense of self. I briefly follow speculative trajectories of kantha's surfaces and contents to further look for the social world of collected kantha makers. I continue to examine kanthas made by elite women as objects of recuperation inflected by women's authorial voices and everyday gendered negotiations, and as sites of inscribing the self in relation to the sacred. I end the paper with the contention that while some women embroidered im/possible worlds to recuperate from effects of colonialism and patriarchy, others sought comfort in translating emergent ideological underpinnings of the elite class onto the kantha surfaces. [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]

This paper examines the audiovisual genre of Hindutva pop and its connections to Hindu right-wing violence in India. Hindutva pop music videos instigate violence against Muslims and advocate the establishment of a Hindu state. Examining the YouTube channels on which these songs circulate, as well as the textual aspects of music videos, I argue that the genre becomes a machine for the transmission of political affect. Consequently, I argue for what I call "violent spectating" – a visceral and affective politics of spectacularized hatred that takes advantage of digital platforms but exists in constant dialogue and exchange with right-wing extremism offline. [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’.

Decolonial studies define the coloniality of power as a complex assemblage of dominance and hegemony that emerged during the modern era or the era of colonialism, which stretches from the conquest of the Americas to the present. This article argues that, as part of the critical dialogue between decolonial studies and Islamic liberation theology, the latter should position itself in a decolonial political praxis around the preferential option for the poor that takes both a decolonial turn and a decolonial option seriously. There is a tendency to appropriate certain brands of decolonial studies to engage with forms of nationalism, such as Hindutva, to build a “decolonial option” in the global South by undermining the key insights of the “decolonial turn”. This article specifically engages with the claims of “decolonial Hindutva” to critique the nationalist appropriation in decolonial studies, thereby marking its divergence from decolonial Islamic liberation theology.

Given the emergence of the Ram Janmabhoomi Movement in the early 1990s, a group of female ascetics and sadhvis displayed tendencies of eschewing conventional gendered images and reinforcing the ideals of virtuous motherhood and female warriorhood in an effort to establish women’s alternative authority in the public and private domains. In order to galvanise women’s participation in the public sphere, these sadhvis allowed women to assume roles that would otherwise be reserved for men on the grounds that men are no longer living according to their dharma. In reality, the sadhvis were reorganising the feminine space within a predominately masculine Hindutva movement by recommending a level of politicisation of women’s private responsibilities in the public sphere with a distinctive articulation of particular gender stereotypes. Taking into account these factors, my aim in writing this essay is to examine the ramifications of the agency and authority that these sadhvis achieved while actively participating in the Hindutva movement. This paper also aims to find out which types of approaches they employed to address the conflicts between conventional womanhood, asceticism, and heroic femininity in the arena of public life.

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.

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.

In this article, I use Critical Technocultural Discourse Analysis (CTDA) to examine the productive associations between Twitter as a technological artifact and the quotidian discourse on Hindu nationalism online. The analysis explores the interplay between (1) Twitter as a technical artifact—examining the interface for its affordances and protocols; (2) Twitter as practice—unpacking the quotidian discourse conventions and strategies used to articulate Hindu nationalism; and (3) Twitter as ideology—examining how Hindutva ideology co-opts the platform's affordances to promote anti-minority discrimination. My analysis highlights how the online discourse of Hindu nationalism is a constitutive force informing discussions and decisions concerning several vital issues related to governance, policies, citizenship, COVID-19, and other topics. The discourse of Hindu nationalism online has the potential to percolate into the lived realities of people and has material implications for the workings of the state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

India is the largest democracy globally; however, right-wing populism has led to a dramatic shift in India's political landscape, particularly for religious minorities and Dalits. Discrimination, abusive slurs, or news of violence against people in this group should not be tolerated even for a single day. "Hindutva" ideology, or "Hindu nationalism," advocates violence against Muslims and views them as outsiders and potential threats to the country's security. That has created a sense of feeling unsafe for Muslims in their own country and an unending wave of intolerance spread by the progenies of the RSS. In light of the Holy Quran and Gandhian approach, this paper defines the type of religious intolerance and how it is spreading and damaging the social fabric of the society and suggests ways to combat religious intolerance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the 1980s, feminist scholars have explored the dynamic linkages between nationalism and gender. Case studies have shown representations of women as reproducers, transmitters of culturally sanctioned behaviour, signifiers of ethnic groups and markers of national identity and honour. The emergence of social media created a new digital arena for the circulation of tropes related to gender and nationalism, and the recent rise of Hindu nationalism in India was reflected and perpetuated in social media. This article explores several memes in the intersecting discourse of gender and Hindu nationalism and investigates memes, tweets, Facebook posts and hashtags that were used on social media during the general elections held in India in 2019. Such media content reveals the extent to which nationalist projects relied on gender norms. Although there is no fixed pattern in terms of how gender shapes memes and digital images, we can identify gendered ideologies of nationalism that embrace patriarchal forms of social organization. The article shows that current online discourses of Hindu nationalism often perpetuate patterns of heteronormative, hegemonic masculinity embedded in satire and jokes. Though women's participation and visibility are on the rise in the Global South, sexism and misogyny manifest as mediatized satire in political memes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article makes a case for the inclusion of piety politics and populist masculinities in any analysis of the governance and international relations between two South Asian rivals and nuclear neighbours; Muslim-majority Pakistan and Hindu-majority India. It offers a comparative case-study of the redeemed Sufi masculinity of the recently deposed Pakistani Prime Minister, Imran Khan, and the ascetic Hindutva one performed by the Prime Minister of India, Narendra Modi. The study finds that the nativist, capitalist and gender discriminatory regimes of both populist leaders depend on subduing any dissenting resistance offered by subaltern masculinist and feminist politics. The conclusion finds that military-pious-heteronormative masculinity serves to stabilize patriarchy in both 'manly states' and underwrites regional security policies. It also points to how subversive movements are constantly challenging these hegemonic masculinities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reads V.D. Savarkar's last work, Six Glorious Epochs of Indian History, and advances two arguments concerning Hindutva international thought. Firstly, it foregrounds and theorizes an organicist conception of the international that is embedded in the text. Savarkar's narrative contains a social evolutionary account of India's historical international relations. Drawing upon a history of over two thousand years of warfare, they are extremely violent, visceral and mediated by caste and race. These aspects have not been adequately discussed within existing expositions, which emphasize culture and geopolitics. Secondly, the paper examines the Savarkarite framing of the "Akhand Bharat" problematic and the strategy for its resolution. Savarkar situates this post-partition problematic within a long and glorious record of the Hindus in successfully resisting their homeland's internationalization. The resolution – the establishment of a subcontinental polity of the Hindus – gains within Savarkarite thought the legitimacy and force of a millenialist, affectively-charged history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nehruvian brand of secularism made its place in sociopolitical space of India against the overarching tradition of Hindu nationalism and continued to define the contours of civic identity of the Indian nation state. Hindu nationalist tendencies and Hindutva ideologues in the guise of correcting the nation-ness of India and saving the dominion of "Hindu, Hindi and Hindustan" made their formal entry through BJP coming from a long ideological impetus of RSS and Jana Sangh. The trivial fact for the state of secularist traditions and pluralistic fabric of society has been directly challenged since 2014 and major steps are being take nunder the Hindu Rashtra regime of Modi to make India a majoritarian state, steering India's identity to ethnic identity. Modi regime is altering the course of state and society and this fact is no longer covet since India has witnessed the aftermaths of CAB, NCR, farmer rights protest and revocation of Article 370. It is no more ambiguous to decide either Hindutva has been a hegemonic discourse now or secular traditions are retrograding in the very fabric of the society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much literature covers how the rise of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in India impacted on the political marginalisation of Muslims, while it has not been examined in sufficient depth how the internal dynamics of Congress contributed to this decline in Muslim nominations for elections. This article examines the Congress party's organisational circumstances that affected Muslims' electoral representation in 1980s Gujarat. It demonstrates that, along with the influence of competing Hindutva forces, the ongoing 'deinstitutionalisation' of the Congress party also damaged the political representation of Muslims. Interview accounts and archival documents indicate how factional fighting within Congress subverted the faction-like consolidation of the Muslim leaders' negotiation power. The article argues that despite vertical and dyadic ties with Hindu leaders inside the party, Muslim Congressmen could not attain unified leadership to generate sufficient pressure on the party to nominate Muslims for elections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How and why do right-wing populist parties engage in diaspora outreach? This article uses populism as a lens through to study diaspora engagement, and compares strategies used by right-wing parties in power (Turkey's AKP and India's BJP) to access their diasporas. While we find that polarising and civilisationist discourses are adopted in both cases for uniting the diaspora behind the populist in power, we argue that these strategies are implemented for different purposes. In the Turkish case, the promotion of Turkish and Sunni-Muslim identification serves the purpose of garnering electoral support behind the ruling party, while in the Indian case, identification with Hindutva is used to achieve the financial and developmental goals of the ruling party. By comparing outreach strategies through the analysis of policies and practices employed by the parties as well as the activities of their diasporic organisations, the article contributes to debates on party-led diaspora engagement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The question of how a country can pursue economic policy while safeguarding its— its national autonomy and identity from foreign influence in an unequal world has assumed new importance in the context of the rise of authoritarian leaders and critical interrogation of globalization in the late twentieth century. The analytic power of terms like neoliberalism and populism is questionable in explaining the economic policy mix or trajectory of an individual nation, especially in the non-Western world. Unearthing the idioms of expression and claims to authenticity of various political interests vying for influence on the scale of the nation-state may be more fruitful. A mosaic of such fragments can help illuminate the opacity of the economic present. Turning back to the period of decolonization in the mid-twentieth century, this article shows how India's recently ascendant Hindu nationalists sought to stake their legitimacy on reconciling economic development to their form of cultural nationalism. It shows how and why Hindu nationalists fashioned a program of small-scale local industrial development and intranational trade as a more authentic alternative to the economic planning being pursued in India and elsewhere. This vision of development focused on the small Hindu trader of North India, the Hindu nationalists' chief constituency. The legacies of this vein of thinking live on, bolstering popular support for Hindu nationalism and posing challenges to efforts seeking to further integrate India into the global economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dr B. R. Ambedkar noted that any freedom struggle or political change needs a base of cultural renaissance, reforms—both social and religious. Our retaliation against colonialists began from the very moment they tried to colonise India. Beginning with the Battle of Colachel that took place in 1741, there were uprisings from tribes in North East, Bengal and central India. Kuka Sikhs were the first to promote swadeshi, with the insistence on wearing hand woven clothes. This freedom struggle had many streams—earlier battles all over Bharat, revolutionary actions, organised arm struggle like Azad Hind Fauj (INA) and many streams of political thought that worked under the larger umbrella of the Indian National Congress while some worked independently. We had Home Rule League, Hindu Mahasabha, Swaraj Party and Congress Socialist Party (CSP). It was a long drawn struggle that was built on dharmic renaissance and cultural nationalism sparked by Swami Dayanand Saraswati. After working with revolutionaries and Congress party and studying history, Dr K. B. Hedgewar identified the problem of Bharat as a fractious Hindu society and the collective amnesia inculcated by the British. He decided to create a non-political organisation by first preparing battle-worthy citizens and founded the RSS. Contrary to critics' claims, RSS too contributed to freedom struggle. Most important was its role on the eve of Independence in protecting Hindu-Sikh brethren from mindless violence and rehabilitating them when the leaders were busy celebrating the country's independence on 15 August in 1947. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article seeks to explore a hitherto unploughed field of research on Indian freedom movement in general and Subhas Chandra Bose in particular that is the influence of Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay, the famous novelist of Bengal in the life of Subhas Chandra Bose, the militant nationalist. While Bankim Chandra was never embroiled in politics, yet his influence on Indian nationalist movement was most profound. It was particularly discernible in the firebrand revolutionaries of Bengal whose legacy was inherited by Subhas Chandra Bose. No work on Bankim Chandra's influence on the inception, germination, evolution, articulation maturation and expression of Bose's concept of nationalism has been produced so far. The article tries to recapture and reassess the extent of reflection of Bankim Chandra's outlook on British rule in India and India's subjection to British imperialism, the contentious issue of Hindu nationalism and also related pertinent issues like communalism and secularism. It is a comparative study which intends to review these issues and questions in critical perspective. The central point is that Bankim Chandra's influence on Bose was not transitory but everlasting and Bankim was always an abiding source of inspiration behind all his nationalist endeavour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]