Passions of the Political

boundary 2 (online), 2021

South Asian Review, 2021

In this deeply relevant and engaging book, Anustup Basu analyzes Hindu political monotheism in India through three main lenses: how a unified Hinduism was constructed by figures in India and Europe during the long nineteenth century; how a singular Hinduism was used by Indians in the twentieth century to imagine India as a Hindu nation and Hindu state; and how Hindutva has transformed over the last three decades into Hindutva 2.0 through new mediascapes and informational ecologies that disseminate Hindu political monotheism as norm and aspiration. Basu's aims are twofold. First, he seeks to present "a genealogy of Hindutva as political monotheism in relation to the colonial epistemological invention of 'Hinduism,' the broader arc of Indian modernity itself, and India's own constitutional revolution of 1950" (3). Second, he aims to "place the present Hindu ascension in a wider basin of global unrest, liberal crisis, and the rise of untimely chauvinisms" (3). Drawing upon sources underused in scholarship on Hindu political identity and nationalism, Basu invokes Carl Schmitt's writings on political theology, including Schmitt's thesis that "all significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts" (4). The book is divided into four chapters that respectively analyze the Hindu political, the Hindu nation as an organism, Indian monotheism, and Hindutva 2.0. Basu develops his arguments persuasively and logically across each of the body chapters. He also extensively contextualizes his work among existing scholarship, including that on the history of Hinduism, political theology, and the media technologies of Hindu nationalism. In Chapter 1, "Questions Concerning the Hindu Political," Basu establishes a solid theoretical foundation for his arguments, which include rethinking Schmitt's notion of the political as not so much "religious or theological" (14) but as "fundamentally monotheistic" (14). Applied to the Hindu political, this monotheism means, according to Basu, a "singular impelling of devotion to the nation and the state" (14). This allows Basu to intersect Schmitt's work with Hindutva in three ways. First, he contextualizes Hindutva within a modern understanding of religion to "detect a consistent monotheistic imperative working throughout the modern discursive invention of 'Hinduism'" (16) from the early nineteenth century onward. Second, he argues that "the Hindu nationalist imagination itself is for the most part thoroughly orientalist and Eurocentric" (17). Third, Hindu nationalism's institutional rise in the 1920s and 1930s "was directly inspired by European fascism and a set of Herderian cultural-historical pieties" (17). By positing a Schmitt-Hindutva connection, Basu asks whether majoritarian Hindu identity can qualify and persist as a homogenized political. He asks, "If the identity itself is to be spiritually presided over by a Savarna elite that represents barely a quarter of the population, then to what extent and in which ways does the question of homogeneity [such as of castes and regions] become complicated?" (27). Basu methodically probes this resonant question throughout the remainder of the book. In Chapter 2, "The Hindu Nation as Organism," Basu insightfully examines how a Hindu nation idealizes itself as a singular, harmonious society of "organic homogeneity" (31) in spite of caste hierarchies and their contractual social orders. Moreover, this organismic entity claims for itself the antiquity through which caste inequalities have persisted. Basu argues that Hindu nationalism since the end of the nineteenth century "invoke[s] a

2022

An ideology once on the fringe of India's political cognition, Hindutva has recently garnered renewed attention for its success in Indian electoral politics, evolving transnational reach and ongoing saffronization of civic institutions and liberties. Anustup Basu's monograph, Hindutva as Political Monotheism (henceforth HPM), presents a hitherto underutilized lens of analysis. The book extends the works of political theorist Carl Schmitt on the monotheistic imperative found in the European theorizations of religious and ethnocentric nationhood, to India's history with ethnonationalism. According to Schmitt, "all significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts" (p. 4). By connecting this Schmittian notion of political theology with other traditional concepts of Hindu sovereignty and nationhood, Basu argues that politics, which is characterized by a religious motive, must be inherently monotheistic. Accordingly, for Hindutva's dream of a majoritarian "Hindu India" to exist as an unfederated whole, it would require a normative version of Indian monotheism that is Hindu. Therefore, Basu's investigation of Hindutva situates its genesis as "a monotheme of religiosity rather than religion itself," one that sought "ethnocultural consistency rather than a theological unity" (p. 5). To that end, HPM presents two key aspects of relevance: 1) the colonial roots of "Hinduism" as a racialized religious category, modernity's landscape in India, and the drafting and implementation of the constitution in postcolonial India; and 2) the rise of Hindutva amid other reactionary ethnonationalist uprisings in the face of liberalism's crisis globally. Within this context, Basu traces the quest to develop a monotheistic Hindu politic as a literary and culturalist project during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and suggests its progression today into a techno-urban advertised brand, which has often been termed as "Hindutva 2.0." In HPM, Basu refrains from offering a chronologically linear narration of how core notions of Hindutva were/are conceptualized, but rather claims to showcase his "speculation" on the topic by drawing from a myriad of sources to contribute to the investigation of Hindutva's monotheistic temperament. Chapter One, "Questions Concerning the Hindu Political," introduces and elaborates on the key theoretical concepts from Schmitt's

2021

Journal of People's Studies, 2016

Rohith Vemula's death is not just an institutional murder; rather it is the systemic stratagem of a deadly design. His death has raised eyebrows of the entire world, as it is the continuum of the Hindutva assault on Dalit assertion. In many ways the radical Dalit politics espoused by groups like the Ambedkar Students Association (ASA) is diametrically opposite to that of Hindutva. Nothing else punctures the pompous claims about Hindu civilisation, culture and rashtra, as effectively as the radical Dalit politics. Ever since Phule-Ambedkar discourse, the radical Dalits have pointedly questioned the very existence of a Hindu society, culture and civilisation. Examining it from the Dalit-Adivasi viewpoint is crucial since it would unfold the dynamics of the social, religious and politics of communal fascism to the lowest level. In a broader perspective, communalism of polity is preliminary to fascism of polity. In today's context what is going on in India it is not mere communalism of polity, rather it is the politics of fascism under the Hindutva brigade married to the corporate capital. Thus in this paper I engage with a critical outlook of the very political ideology and how would it matter to the Dalits and Adivasis (or Indigenous people). I also engage with the questions of how caste fascism is the political theology of domination? What is the Indian perspective to understand the fascism of caste? What was the ideological upsurge of Hindutva? How did it domineered all aspects of indigenous life?

Hindutva as Political Monotheism, 2020

Hindutva as Political Monotheism extracts a postulate from western political theologies of state and sovereignty: in order for there to be an organismic Hindu nation, there has to be a Hindu monotheism or a secular equivalent of that. There had to be a Hindu providential narrative, an axiomatic church and a laity that could be parlayed into a political peopleness. It would mean the subsuming of a vast array of polytheistic, pantheistic, or henotheistic cults featuring millions of gods into a singular edifice of faith and inventing a congregational volk beyond the caste system. This book looks at three crucial moments in this project of Abrahamic modernization, exposing the purported ‘Hindu Nation” itself as a grossly orientalist vision. The first is an Indological invention of ‘Hinduism’ in the course of the long 19th century and beyond, with Bhagwad Gita as Holy book, featuring intellectuals like Rammohun Roy, Bankimchandra Chattyopadhyay, S. Radhakrishnan and Gandhi. It also includes B. R. Ambedkar’s eviscerating critique of this modern template. The second moment involves a mode of ethno-religious nationalism adopted by 20th century ideologues like V.D Savarkar and Madhav Golwalkar in the quest of a Hindu monotheme based on territory, race, religion, culture, and language. The third features the mutations of this literary-cultural project in the era of finance capital, Bollywood, and New Media. Is ‘Hindutva 2.0’, endowed with global industries, new ecumenical forms and demiurgic powers, and the spectacular rise of the Hindu right, finally emerging as an electronic monotheme for the nation?

Neo-Hindutva: Evolving Forms, Spaces, and Expressions of Hindu Nationalism, 2019

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.

boundary 2, 2023

HINDUTVA: MYTHS AND REALITY [This essay is in response to demand from friends across the globe to make available a concise primer on the toxic ideology of Hindutva based on its own archives for ready reference.] Introduction The term Hindutva took birth with the appearance of VD Savarkar's book titled Hindutva in 1923. Savarkar’s Hindutva was declared to be the Holy Book of Hindu Sangathan or organization. M. S. Golwalkar, who headed the RSS after K. B. Hedgewar, too regarded Savarkar’s Hindutva as a great scientific book which fulfilled the need of a text-book on Hindu nationalism. According to a biography of founder of RSS, Hedgewar published by the RSS, “Savarkar’s inspiring and brilliant exposition of the concept of Hindutva marked by incontestable logic and clarity, struck the cord of Doctorji’s [Hedgewar’s] heart”. Despite such statements glorifying Hindutva as priceless contribution in defence of Hindu nationalism, the contents of the book did not attract many Hindu leaders and remained beyond the comprehension of common Hindus. In fact, even the title of the book seemed to have been an afterthought. A perusal of the original edition (1923) will show that the booklet was printed with the title Hinduism but subsequently a separate piece of paper on which Hindutva was printed was pasted on the title page of the book. Since the term remained alien even to the Savarkarites, by the 4th edition Hindutva as title was dropped and it was published under a new title Who Is A Hindu? In 1963 Maharashtra Provincial Hindusabha published it as part of Savarkar’s collected works with the title Essentials of Hindutva. Another notable fact about this book was that it was published under the pen name ‘A Maratha’ signifying a regional identity of the author where as book stressed only the Hindu identity of the country and its inhabitants. Savarkar admitted at the outset that the ‘term Hindutva defies all attempts at analysis’. He began by trying to make a clear-cut distinction between his theory of Hindutva and religion Hinduism. But few pages later it became clear that Hindutva was nothing else but political Hinduism. According to his definition a Hindu "is he who looks upon the land that extends from Sindhu to Sindhu, from the Indus to the Seas, as the land of his forefathers—his pitribhu, who inherits the blood of that race whose first discernible source could be traced to the Vedic Saptasindhs [seven holy rivers] and which on its onward march, assimilating much that was incorporated and ennobling much that was assimilated, has come to be known as the Hindu people, who has inherited and claims as his own the culture of that race as expressed chiefly in their common classical language Sanskrit and represented by a common history, a common literature, art and architecture, law and jurisprudence, rites and rituals, ceremonies and sacraments, fairs and festivals…These are the essentials of Hindutva—a common rashtra [nation] a common Jati [race] and a common Sanskriti [culture, though in latter editions it is translated as civilization]. According to Savarkar, these were the Hindus with Aryan blood who established the Hindu nation the day "when the Horse of Victory returned to Ayodhya unchallenged and unchallengeable, the great white Umbrella of Sovereignty was unfurled over that, Imperial throne of Ramchandra the brave, Ramchandra the good, and a loving allegiance to him was sworn, not only by the Princes of the Aryan blood but Hanuman—Sugriva—Bibhishana from the south— that day was the real birth-day of our Hindu people." Savarkar’s book Hindutva was haphazard, confused, incoherent, monotonous, contradictory and repetitive in comparison to other works of Savarkar. In fact in Hindutva, propagated as the primer of the Hindu nationalism less than one quarter of the space was devoted to the theme. Major parts of the book contained repetitive discussions over the origin of nomenclature like Hindu/Hindusthan, folk literature, evils in Buddhism, how Sikhs, Jains and Buddhists were Hindus and description of perpetually continuously raging conflicts between Vedic and non-Vedic sects in Hinduism. The concept of Hindu Nation as elaborated in Hindutva remained a fringe thought despite the fact that Savarkar while presiding over the 19th session of Hindu Mahasabha at Ahmedabad in December 1937 declared it to be the goal of Hindu Mahasabha, there were not many takers for the book. The dismal reach of the book can be gauged by the fact that after the publication of its first edition in 1923, the second edition could appear only in 1942. With the last edition appearing in 2003, only seven editions of the book came out in more than eight decades. However, with the ascendency of the RSS-BJP in the Indian parliamentary politics in late 1990s idolizing of Savarkar began. While renaming the Port Blair airport after V. D. Savarkar on May 4, 2002, the then Home Minister L. K. Advani declared that “Hindutva propounded by Savarkar was an all-encompassing ideology with its roots in the country’s heritage”. The glorification of the prophet of Hindutva did not stop there. On February 26, 2003, a portrait of Savarkar was unveiled at Parliament. Savarkar thus came to share the eminence accorded to Gandhi and other prominent leaders of the freedom struggle in the Central Hall of Parliament. However, we need to have a convincing answer to the question that if Savarkar with his eternal love for the two-nation theory and his conscious aloofness from the Indian freedom struggle can be glorified as an Indian nationalist and patriot, then who can stop Mohammed Ali Jinnah from claiming this status? The present RSS-BJP rulers led by PM Modi keep on declaring publically that they are committed to usher India into a Savarkarite model of Hindu nation. We will evaluate the claims made on behalf of the flag-bearers of Hindutva in the following. 5 Myths are discussed in this essay.