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In recent times many indigenous Muslim groups in Assam have asserted their ethnic identities as Deshi, Goriya, Moriya by distancing themselves from the immigrant Miya Muslims. In this regard, they have received much patronage from the current BJP government. These developments have happened in the background of the consolidation of Hindutva in Assam and the consequent otherization of the Muslim community as a whole. This paper has two objectives: First, it tries to understand why a separate identity consciousness among indigenous Muslims have emerged. Secondly, it goes on to explore as to why indigenous Muslims in recent times have offered political support to the BJP. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This self-reflective essay explores the wider implications of the BJP's inauguration of the Ram Temple in Ayodhya, from the perspective of a scholar of Sanskrit and classical Indian religions. What questions does it raise about our relationship with history, heritage, decolonization and the politics of memory? How can one decolonize oneself and society by reclaiming tradition and heritage, without political agendas and misinterpretations of the past? The article argues for a critical, non-passive, creative, reclamation of tradition for the formation of a truly free decolonized political consciousness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

India today exemplifies the making of an "ethnocracy," a polity in which the dominant ethnic group obtains political control and deploys the state apparatus to ethnicize territory and society. I illustrate the making of India's ethnocracy by documenting key political and policy practices of Narendra Modi's rule. I do this by offering evidence of this process by documenting: (1). the contest between the dominant Hindus and minority Muslims over territorial space and the public realm; (2). solidifying Hindutva ethno-nationalism; which builds on and consolidates; and (3). long-term political and economic stratification between Hindus and Muslims. However, the making of India's ethnocracy has not gone unchallenged. Therefore, I direct attention to the resistance mounted against India's ethnocratic turn in the institutional, political and social terrains. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the massive victory of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in the 2014 parliamentary elections, India has seen an entrenchment of the politics of Hindutva, a political-cultural justification of Hindu nationalism and of Hindu hegemony within India. Society and politics in India are experiencing unprecedented transformation under the forces unleashed by Hindu nationalism. The vision that framed the Constitution and the making of the modern Indian nation-state and parliamentary democracy are under challenge. This article discusses three books that assess this trend: Thomas Blom Hansen (2021), The Law of Force: The Violent Heart of Indian Politics, Debasish Roy Chowdhury and John Keane (2021), To Kill a Democracy: India's Passage to Despotism, and Badri Narayan (2021), Republic of Hindutva: How the Sangh Is Reshaping Indian Democracy. This article seeks to shed some light on these processes of transformation in Indian society and politics and mull the prospects for Indian democracy. These books, through taking different analytical frameworks and with varying emphases, provide invaluable insights into the social and political dynamics of contemporary India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Though early research suggested that right-leaning groups were a radicalized monolith, recent shifts in research are producing far more nuanced accounts. Our article contributes to this effort by spotlighting novel discursive strategies of right-leaning groups in India that leverage decolonization rhetoric, democratic governance, and other seemingly left-leaning rationales to mobilize right-wing groups against global technology companies, especially Twitter (now X).¹ We collected and analyzed publicly accessible data from Koo—an alternative social networking platform populated with discourses of India’s ideological right. We then used critical discourse analysis to identify the discursive strategies of right-leaning users on Koo deployed to challenge the power of global technology companies – calls for data localization, veiled suppression, and paternalism and responsibility [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The digital infrastructure of Hindutva seeds, circulates and amplifies Islamophobic hate, interacting bidirectionally with brick-and-mortar violence. This paper examines the circulation of Hindutva on digital platforms (Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and Telegram) around the intercommunal violence that emerged in Leicester in September 2022. Based on a digital ethnography of Twitter, interconnected digital platforms, and Hindutva media (Hindutva-related digital video channels such as Citti Media on YouTube, mainstream broadcast media such as NewsX, and text-based digital platforms such as OpIndia), the analysis theorizes the global flow of Hindutva across geographically dispersed contexts, connecting the diaspora with India, creating an uninterrupted communication infrastructure around the frame of the “Hindu in danger,” simultaneously intersecting with white supremacy in producing and amplifying Islamophobic hate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The strategic mobilization of humor by Hindutva groups online contributes to the mainstreaming of supremacist ideologies that inform extremist behavior. Analyzing the social media recontextualizations of the 1992 Babri Masjid demolition as case studies, this paper examines how online instantiations of Islamophobic humor contribute to the Hindutva revisioning of popular memory. This paper expands the understanding of how Islamophobia is normalized through the shifting affective framing of the Babri Masjid demolition, from shame to schadenfreude, from tragedy to comedy, and from a threat to Indian secularism to a necessary act of paternalistic disciplining. Studying these shifts through specific examples of Islamophobic humor builds upon previous insights into: (1) the affective regimes by which Islamophobic ideas are made palatable to a wider audience, (2) discriminatory speech as an act of pleasure, and (3) how both of these work toward the reworking of popular memory in service of the Hindutva political project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The religious veneration of Bharat Mata began with the three temples honouring her in the Hindu pilgrimage sites of Varanasi, Haridwar, and Ujjain. They symbolise the nation by anthropomorphising the territory and establish the relationship between nation-divine and its citizen-devotee through 'darshan' wherein the latter is imbued with feelings of patriotism. By studying the narratives emerging from these spaces, referred to as temple publics, it has been argued that they are reflective of majoritarian politics, where the aim is to construct a new religion called nationalism, with Bharat Mata at its helm and a set of rituals and unique traditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The right-wing extremists, BJP and RSS, have a long-term mission to construct a Hindu nation bound by Ramrajya, a political model derived from the epic Ramayana. In its nationalistic project, the Hindutva desires to incorporate Dalits. For achieving the same, it usurps Dalits by appropriating Ambedkar – through strategically eroding his radicalism. Additionally, it uses Ramayana as a cultural tool to de-ideologize Dalits. It promotes Ramayana as an egalitarian epic to Dalits – for subsuming them within the Ramrajya politics. Dalits are losing political consciousness and they are disoriented by the Hindutva. In this article, I explore how a Tamil film named Kaala, directed by Pa. Ranjith, has countered these efforts of the Hindutva in the popular culture. In Kaala, Ranjith challenges the Hindutva's appropriation of Dalits by re-creating Ambedkar's radical legacy on the big screens. In the film, he re-narrates the epic from an Ambedkarite perspective to counter the Hindutva's efforts in de-ideologizing Dalits. Ranjith is a radical director who makes various transformations in Tamil cinema. His vision is to carry forward Ambedkarite politics in the popular culture. In this article, I explore how he effectively counters the Hindutva. To accomplish the objectives of the study, I use Ambedkarite framework as an analytical tool. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A mass protest by farmers camped outside New Delhi in 2020–21 persuaded Prime Minister Narendra Modi's government to repeal laws that aimed to further liberalize Indian agricultural markets. The protests reflected the depth of an ongoing agrarian crisis in the Indian countryside. The Green Revolution introduced in the 1960s and the economic liberalization of the 1990s deepened rural inequalities, creating fertile ground for right-wing populism. More recently, however, economic vulnerability has catalyzed a reassertion of farmer and rural identities over religious affiliations. [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 paper describes how cultivator caste Kolis, who are the largest electoral bloc in Gujarat, India's flagship state of Hindu chauvinism, navigate, circumvent, and are constituted by the intensification of Hindu chauvinism in the state's borderland districts dominated by subordinated social groups. Once the centerpiece of a secular political coalition in Gujarat, the personhood of Kolis at the intersection of the Aravali hills and Malwa plateau, a window onto rural central- and western India, has been constructed in complex ways since 2014. Mass-mediated media narratives potentiate Brahminical hegemony, the temple-industrial complex produces affective potentialities with caste Hinduism, and the politics of cow protection promotes new relationalities with bovines. However, this identity formation is fraught with slippages and reveals the always open possibilities of oppositional subjectivities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

India is facing a period of seismic backlash against feminist and progressive politics and the pace of change, particularly over the last ten years, has been breakneck with serious consequences for women's equality and human rights. Drawing on an examination of the reversals and pushbacks against women's rights in three areas - the citizenship rights of Muslim women, the rights of domestic workers, and the impacts of restrictions on foreign funding on women's rights organising - this article seeks to contribute not just to an understanding of the nature of the backlash faced by women's rights in India, but also to the wider debates on backlash from global South feminist perspectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses the recent rise of Islamophobic films in India. While it may seem that social media has led to a rise in Hindu nationalism and Islamophobia in the recent past, it is crucial to recognize that this narrative is incomplete. The rise of Islamophobia in the country can be traced back to the 20th century freedom struggle where a counter-narrative to Gandhian concepts of communal harmony can be found in the writings of various leaders, artists and activists. Social media has allowed for a re-proliferation of those strands of thought in recent times through the platforms such as Youtube, which has led to the success of movies like The Kashmir Files or The Kerala Story. [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]

The brief but powerful intersectional protest at Shaheen Bagh in 2020 against the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) passed by India's Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led government presented a paradox: as the immobile and visibly Muslim Indian women protesters, emblematized by the dadis or grandmothers of Shaheen Bagh, formed a blockade, their images quickly went viral. Inspired by their example, many makeshift 'Shaheen Baghs' cropped up across the nation, the name of this neighborhood in South Delhi exceeding its location to become a metonym of dissent in a country hurtling toward fascism. This article argues that the protest performative of Shaheen Bagh marked a significant narrative break in representation of Indian women's iconized mobility after liberalization. Reading Shaheen Bagh along with Anita Desai's 'The Rooftop Dwellers' and Deepti Kapoor's A Bad Character, I examine the politics of representing women's mobility in Delhi, and its gendered constraints as well as strategies to overcome and subvert them within the larger context of both Hindutva and liberalization. I conclude by locating a hopeful feminist counternarrative in Shaheen Bagh against the prevalent discourse of marketized Hindutva that melds the cultural and economic logic of both neoliberalism and Hindu nationalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study maps the interactions of the Hindutva brand of political populism, which is in rise in India, with the feminist politics and concerns. To study this interaction, the article qualitatively studies the phenomenon of Hindutva-populism and feminist politics and uses the Bhartiya Janata Party, the Hindu-rightist political party, as the site to explore the gendered political culture and the complex relationship that populism and feminism share on the women question in their quest for political and social transformation in India. For this purpose, the article focuses on the broad themes, highlighting the differential visions of both projects, of: the lens through which the problems are diagnosed, the solutions proposed to these problems and the role of the related variables such as power, state and leadership, which puts them in a fundamental clash with each other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent decades, an important field of research has emerged concerning the careers of Members of the European Parliament. Due to the specific nature of the European Parliament, the European Union, the multilevel politics and the peculiarity of the supranational political class, it is of particular interest to map and control the regularity of, and changes in, the composition of the European Parliament and the impact over systemic features or policy-making aspects. For this reason, the article presents a new dataset comprising a collection of detailed information about all of the Members of the European Parliament who held office from the first election in 1979 until the latest in 2019. This dataset represents a useful novelty because it is a dynamic tool that allows reconnecting the Members of the European Parliament's position and responsibilities within the European Parliament to their political background before entering the supranational assembly. Finally, the article suggests possible fields of research in which this type of data could be useful in deepening and consolidating our knowledge about the European Parliament and its members. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay draws a parallel between the political and social dynamics of Hindu nationalism in India under Narendra Modi and the policies of racial segregation of the Jim Crow era in the United States (from approximately 1880 to 1965). As with the marginalization of black Americans based on race during Jim Crow, Hindu nationalism aims to marginalize Muslim Indians based on religion. Methods similar to those used in the Jim Crow South—including exclusionary laws, segregation, and vigilante violence—are now being deployed in India to subdue Muslims. Such actions go against the principles of equality established by India's 1950 Constitution. As in the Jim Crow South, the judiciary in India has proven slow to play its assigned role as guarantor of liberal constitutionalism. Friends of liberal, constitutional democracy will be wise not to count on judges to salvage the situation. In the end, only the voters can decide to stop Hindu nationalism, or else underwrite its final advance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

Popular culture, though not apolitical, overlaps with overt political mobilisation, and vice versa. With the resurgence of populism, it is reaffirmed that politics has a propensity to co-opt popular culture, or, it often conflated itself with politics so that no separation exists. Are popular culture and political action co-constitutive? Using a deductive method as it explores the construction of 'political activism', foregrounding the popular culture as the axis of political mobilisation. It attempts to elucidate how Sikhs create their 'political' identities. The use of Music as explicitly 'political' and the adaptability of the 'political' youth in the times of 'Hindutva'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explains and corroborates the mechanisms by which civic and political spaces opposed to Hindu nationalism have been attacked, especially after the arrival of the right-wing Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government in 2014. Three mechanisms are discerned for replacing pluralistic values with Hindu majoritarian ones. Sometimes institutions are just allowed to drift by interpreting old rules in new ways. For example, no formal rules for media control have changed but the government's control over media has increased substantially. At other times, incremental legal and policy changes are executed to make the change explicit, often building on a new moral purpose. To give another example, the Foreign Contribution Regulation Act (FCRA) was amended and weaponized against NGOs in a layered way in 2020. Finally, when political opposition is weak, institutions that have provided guarantees for protecting diversity have simply been displaced by new and radically different ones. This was the case with abrogating Article 370, which converted the special status of the subnational state of Jammu and Kashmir to the status of two federally administered union territories--Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh. These mechanisms place India in a competitive authoritarian frame, where those in power deploy electoral majorities to systematically attack the political opposition, making it more di(cult for it to rise. Despite these propensities, opposition parties have won elections in some of India's subnational states. The challenges facing the world's most populous democracy are significant, even though competitive elements co-exist. These elements in a competitive authoritarian regime, however, are under severe stress. India's democratic credentials can be revived only if the competitive elements of India's democracy stand united against ethno-nationalist Hindu majoritarianism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Narendra Modi is a prime example of a right-wing nationalist populist, in his case, trying to create a new India that rejects India's traditional secular liberalism in favour of a Hindu state. Modi has gained a reputation amongst his supporters as a visionary who is improving India's standing on the world stage as a great power and making a revolutionary change in India. But Modi has come under increasing international concern and condemnation for his majoritarian nationalist authoritarianism, which has seen India slide on many democracy indicators, a reality which his supporters reject. We argue, thus, that there is a fundamental discrepancy between the image of the Modi regime abroad and at home, that has gone unexplored in scholarship. We also contend that this discrepancy is implicated in post-truth politics. Modi's populist project is one of asserting a true Hindu Indian identity, the global criticisms of which, under conditions of post-truth, are either irrelevant or, ironically, contribute to its strength. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

'Decolonization' has superseded 'postcolonial' as the most compelling catchword of the present moment. Broadly speaking, the term possesses two parallel genealogies: African decolonization and Latin American decoloniality. But where are Asian territories such as India and Hong Kong, and, more specifically, fields such as theatre history, located in the debate? This article analyzes the stakes and struggles, inner contradictions and blind spots, involved in decolonizing or decentring the curriculum. It asks whether the decolonial temporalities of our time constitute an adequate lens to theorize theatre history by firstly examining the term's misuse by popular historians, media, and government; and, second, by interrogating a spectrum of positions on 'Indian Theatre' from the nineteenth century onwards. Through this double focus, the article probes the scholarly possibilities for undoing the dominant mode when the 'decolonization trope itself becomes a tool for colonization'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper examines the interface of indigenous faiths with the twin forces of Hindu religious nationalism and Christianity, and the eventual institutionalisation of the former in Arunachal Pradesh, a federal state on India's north-eastern frontier. To substantiate, the paper focuses on nyedar namlos, the newly introduced community prayer halls for Donyi-Polo, the indigenous faith of the Nyishi tribe. The paper argues that nyedar namlos need to be contextualised against the changing socio-political history of the state and its transformation from a socio-political periphery and colonial frontier to an active site of state-making and nation-building, as well as a military frontier, all of which shape the discourse on religion. [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]

When the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (Quad) was resuscitated in November 2017, it was framed as a minilateral grouping of liberal democratic countries to build a free and open Indo-Pacific in the shadow of China's growing assertiveness. However, this Quad 2.0 had not taken collective action until 2021. The four states neither held leaders' summit meetings nor issued joint statements after lower-level meetings. They took no joint quadrilateral actions to deter China either. From a constructivist perspective, this paper addresses this puzzle by critically revisiting the alleged common identity of the four states. It argues that India's national identity has not been built on the ontological difference between liberal democracy and autocracy but on a complex amalgamation of non-alignment, post-imperial ideology, Hindu nationalism and Indian exceptionalism. India, having held a vision of establishing an India–China partnership in Asia, did not regard China as its significant Other until the deadly border clashes between them in June 2020. China's expansionism has challenged India's identity as the pre-eminent power in South Asia and its vision of an equal China–India partnership. Despite India's increased cooperation with its Quad partners since then, the Quad is built more on geopolitical pragmatism than on shared liberal norms and values. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the last few years, much of public discourse has been concerned with the rise of populist movements across the world. Hindu nationalism, Brexit, and the rise of Le Pen are just some of the phenomena that have garnered attention and concern. Although, in Rome and America , classicist and political scientist Dean Hammer does not start with this topic, contemporary populism is his destination, specifically in the shape of Donald Trump and the conditions in which his presidency arose. As Hammer investigates several aspects of both the creation and undoing of self-identity and political norms in the United States, he cites templates, points of comparison, and, finally, warnings in both Rome's founding myths and the history of its transition from republic to principate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is now well-documented that there is a global trend of right-wing nationalism that perceives minorities, particularly Muslims, as a threat to state identity. India is a pertinent example of this trend wherein its legislation and policies over the last ten years have led to Muslims in India being marginalised -- either through their rights as citizens or in terms of the discrimination and violent attacks they experience at the hands of extremist mobs that believe in the Hindutva ideology. This article will critically explore the scriptural and theological presumptions behind India's laws and assess whether or not these presumptions are true in light of 49:13 of the Qur'an. These presumptions involve a particular conception of religious identity, theological belief and nationalism. 49:13 is a useful verse in the Qur'an that deals with all of these conceptions and by investigating them, one may be able to cut through right-wing nationalist rhetoric and engage in fruitful and truthful dialogue about what exactly the Qur'an states about constructing a harmonious society that involves a majority and minority population. [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]

Genocide Watch has declared a 'Genocide Emergency' in India with serious consequences for Muslims and Dalits in India. The Hindutva ecosystem uses the figure of Muslim women as central to the politics of hate. However, Muslim women have also emerged as an important force in resisting this. In this context, this article interrogates what discourses and processes of anti-Muslim violence are being enabled by the Hindutva anti-social learning movements, and how critical-feminist social-learning movements, especially feminists from Muslim backgrounds, challenge and disrupt Hindutva politics. The article shows how critical-feminist social movements are learning, producing, and theorising new understandings of resisting the politics of hate. The article ends with reflections on the significance of this learning in subverting fascistic politics today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Activist research that conducts social investigation and analysis can be the key first step in organising at the grassroots and movement building. This paper critically analyses two research reports titled 'The Foreign Exchange of Hate' (Sabrang/Coalition against Genocide 2002) and 'In Bad Faith' (Awaaz South Asia Watch 2004) produced by progressive activists situated in progressive mobilisations in the North American and British South Asian diasporas. This research was amongst the earliest to systematically investigate and expose the transnational networks and activities of Hindu nationalism. Drawing on the scholarship of Aziz Choudry, I discuss key influences, goals, impacts and costs of these activist research projects. The analysis offer situated insights into the relationship between activist research and movement-building in the context of collective resistance to Hindu nationalism in Eurocentric, liberal multicultural societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [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]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on Facebook's recommendation algorithm reinforcing Hindu nationalism's casteism, discussing how it influences the connections between users of Hindu nationalist groups and caste-centered communities. Topics include the impact of the algorithm on user engagement, the intertwining of caste privilege within the Hindu nationalist space, and how the algorithm-driven model facilitates the expansion of supremacist groups by recommending similar-interest groups and pages.

This essay argues that Sanjay Leela Bhansali's 2018 Bollywood historical film Padmaavat is part of a wider media-informational atmospherics of contemporary Hindu pride and Islamophobia, drawing on advertised energies of disaffection and ethnological stereotyping around the figure of the Muslim. In the process, it constructs a "double shift" Orientalist prism of race perception to view a splendid "Aryan" Hindu past as well as a dark interval of Islamic rule in India marked by a Semitic, Turko-Arabic pathology. The film is part of an overall Hindu nationalist project of constructing a moral memory (contra history) in the era of the digital image that can not only reinvent the past, but also re-texture and re-canvas it, making purported pictures of a glorious Hindu bygone appearing as not just nove, but also tactile and sensuous. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After the Kashmiri Pandits were driven from their homes by a violent insurgency in the 1990s, the issue of their displacement and potential rehabilitation has featured prominently in mainstream Indian political discourse, and particularly in the messaging of the Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The BJP subsequently became the leading political force in India and as the governing party has had ample opportunity to respond to the Pandits' plight. The displacement and possible rehabilitation of the Pandits is thus an appropriate case study to consider how the BJP in government has managed a grievance-based issue that served the party well while it was building its political base. In this article, I apply a critical discourse analysis methodology to the BJP's handling of the plight of the Kashmiri Pandits. I argue that the government has used the plight of the Pandits for electoral advantage while doing little to resolve the issue and failing to create favourable conditions for the community's rehabilitation. The BJP's approach, and the consequent exacerbation of regional and religious polarisation, has instead led to further insecurity for the displaced Pandits. [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]

The article discusses the role of controversial media, particularly in cinema, in shaping religious sentiments, uniting and mobilizing Hindus, and contributing to the rise of Hindu nationalism (Hindutva) in India. Topics include the impact of new-age media, historical memories, and socio-political factors on the propagation of Hindu nationalist ideologies and the socio-cultural transformations driven by digital platforms.

This article shows how the burgeoning Hindu festivals in small town West Bengal – in Hooghly and Nadia – can be understood as a dynamic interplay of political patronage, play as rivalry and revelry, and finally piety. The article argues that in a strategic implementation of competitive Hindutva (Hindu nationalism), the concept of utsab instead of puja is employed by the political leadership to appease the Hindu majority while ostensibly signalling towards Hindu-Muslim harmony and inclusivity. In addition, it argues that the need for decentralisation and fair distribution of resources between the metropolis and the rest of the state is expressed through festival rivalries. Furthermore, the article demonstrates the place of popular culture and aspirations towards a global urban lifestyle in the spaces of libidinal pleasures and pageantry in the festival. Finally, despite the increasingly transgressive revelry, there is a continuing, shrinking yet inviolable presence of devotion and Brahminical or priestly caste doctrine in the festival. [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]

Between 2014 and 2022, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) made a determined bid to establish its electoral and discursive dominance in regions beyond its traditional strongholds in Northern and Western India. In the North-east, in the Christian-majority states of Mizoram, Meghalaya, and Nagaland, it encountered fierce hostility from the Church which exercised a hegemonic control over the religious, social, and political life in these states. This article focuses on the political tussle between the BJP and the Church in this time period and attempts to explore the deeper ideological contestations and competing narratives underlying this struggle and their implications for the Indian political discourse. These include contestations over the very conceptualization of secular democracy in India and the role of religion in it; different understandings of religious conversions and freedom of conscience; and the conflicting agendas around the categories of 'tribe', 'indigenous people'/'adivasi', and 'janjati'/'vanvasi'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the current atmosphere of Hindu nationalist majoritarianism in India, LGBTQ activisms are increasingly being restructured through their allegiance with, or resistance to, a progressively violent imagination of a Hindu India. Within a larger climate of shrinking public freedoms, LGBTQ activisms have made some gains toward inclusive citizenship, and this has led to a false and dangerous correlation that claims Hindu nationalism is queer-friendly. As such, some LGBTQ activists promote "homonationalist" visions of a Hindu nationalist India. These narratives of "homonationalism" mete out violence against many other LGBTQ activists and communities that cannot or will not be interpellated into the Hindu nation. Reflecting on fieldwork with LGBTQ communities, in this article I demonstrate how the psychic life of homonationalism in India is rooted in postcolonial anxieties of defining an "authentic" national subjectivity. Building on theories on the politics of belonging and Lacanian psychoanalysis, I draw parallels between nationalist attachments to Hindu identity and homonationalist attachments to gay identity. In doing so, I argue that an anxious attachment to LGBTQ identity is at the root of homonationalist aspirations of belonging to a (Hindu) nation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examining India's official thinking on international order over the past quarter-century, this article maps the shift in the country's preference from liberal internationalism to the rules-based international order (RIO). It argues that despite Delhi's current narrative of a 'New India', the country's order conception shows continuity in being essentially reformist and mostly consistent with the pillars of the 1945 order. While its marked unease with liberalism is a consequence of the changes afoot in India's domestic politics, this development is consistent with, and contributes to, the decline of liberalism as a global force. The current Indian preference for economic protectionism also reflects the larger trend of economic deglobalization. The description of India as a resurgent civilizational state rather than a liberal democracy, while discursively arresting, does not indicate a divergence with the West on the grand strategic question of order-building. Upon reconstructing the Indian iteration of the RIO, the article finds it to be geographical—focused on Asia and the Indo-Pacific—rather than universal. Finally, it posits that India's persisting problem of inadequate power and its risk-averse responses to great power revisionism are likely to undermine its efforts to effectively partner with democracies to shape the emergent RIO. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 2020 crime thriller web series Paatal Lok featured a Nepali trans woman by the name of Mary Lyngdoh who is referred to as 'Cheeni' (a racial epithet for persons from India's Northeast region and East Asia). The series has been lauded for its inclusive representation of a transgender actor, Henthoi Mairembam from Manipur, yet the choice of a Khasi name, 'Mary Lyngdoh', for a Nepali character as well as the use of 'Cheeni' as an alias raise multiple questions about racialization and queer politics in India. This arbitrary racialized characterization in Paatal Lok and its queer Northeast representation can serve as critical points of departure to examine the emerging LGBTQ politics in Northeast India. This paper attempts to highlight the convergences and incommensurability of LGBTQ politics in the region, particularly in Manipur, with that of mainland India. Against the backdrop of the history of militarization and conflict in Northeast India, LGBTQ individuals migrants from the region are further racialized in India's metropolitan centers. This geopolitical alienation is felt by LGBTQ persons from the Northeast at the scale of the body. LGBTQ politics in Manipur represents a new form of resistance that introduces 'Indigeneity' as an identity and an epistemic category to counter the assimilationist projects of Hindutva's authoritarian nationalism. [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]

Published between 1907 and 1910, Rabindranath Tagore's novel Gora reflects its author's evolving cultural, political, and ideological views in the first decade of the twentieth century. This period was significant not only for Tagore's engagement in and disenchantment with the Swadeshi movement, but also in terms of his critical assessment of the viability of a Hindu cultural-national identity for India. Reading the novel in the light of some of his relevant writings in and around the 1900s, this essay puts Tagore's exploration of Hindu identity into perspective in order to distinguish it from the exclusionary Hindutva ideologies later promoted and popularized in Indian politics. Using a dialogic method in the novel, Tagore pits a limited, divisive, and communalist Hindu ideology against an open, liberal, and alternative Hindu selfhood for India which is compatible with the universal-humanist perspective propounded at the end. Despite endorsing the latter perspective, Tagore nevertheless reveals his concerns and uncertainties about the position of minority communities and outsiders within that holistic paradigm of Indian identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Bengali new wave cinema of the 1960s and 1970s addressed historically important world events through an aesthetic inspired by Marxism and long-standing anti-colonial traditions dating to the middle nineteenth century. At the same time, an aesthetic derived from folk and artistic traditions was embraced as a cultural style in the middle twentieth century by local Marxist progressive theatre and writers' associations. In 1968, the Bengali film director Ritwik Ghatak published a short speculation for the Bengal Youth Festival explaining the scenario for "A Film I want to make about Vietnam." The film was not made, but the imagined detail is very much in the style of the Bengali new wave. Also important—and made, so we can see it—is Satyajit Ray's short film "on" Vietnam, Two: A Film Fable (1964). The two films express, in different ways, the enthusiasm among Bengali intellectuals for Vietnam at the time when revolutionary youth solidarity with the anti-imperialist struggle was strong. What were Ghatak and Ray thinking with these films "on" Vietnam? Can they tell us anything of the times, the engaged role of film, the director as intellectual agitator, the politics of solidarity from afar? By evaluating the reception of historically focussed film from the perspective of the Bengali New Wave, I show how that cinema's fascination with Vietnam evokes both much older folk traditions, yet now leads to a more worrying contemporary coda with the adaptation in 2019 of the old slogan by the Hindutva right to include Jai Ram. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study of how ethnonationalists mobilize digital media is not matched in size by an investigation into the progressive activists digitally mobilizing against them. This is especially true in diaspora communities, which form the focus of this work. In this paper, we discuss diasporic online progressive activism against one form of ethnonationalism, Hindutva. Situating our argument in the context of the Indian Australian diaspora, we argue that the study of activist media ecologies which seek to resist Hindutva is as critical as the study of Hindutva itself, but that scholarship on this kind resistance in diaspora remains sparse. We suggest that the Australian case – witnessing a critical acceleration in Hindutva mobilization since 2020 – provides a unique opportunity to understand the role of digital media at the nascence of online resistance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]