Beauty Queens and Hindu Militants: Indian Women’s Negotiation with Neoliberalism and Hindu Nationalism

Beauty Queens and Hindu Militants: Indian Women’s Negotiation with Neoliberalism and Hindu Nationalism

Through a review of the 2012 documentary film The World before Her directed by Nisha Pahuja, this article provides a critical reflection on how neoliberal governmentality appropriates women’s bodies and subjectivities in two women’s boot camps in India: the Miss India contest and the Hindu militant Durga Vahini camp. Studies on appropriation of women’s bodies in the neoliberal ideology of the m...

Capitalism, Religion, and the Ideological Construction of Hindu Nationalism

Critics of Hindutva nationalism see it as either an elite conspiracy or a mass political movement with no necessary relation to the Hindu faith. I focus instead on its ideological deployment, treating it as a modern religious construction of Hinduism that legitimates capitalism—much like Christianity in the 17th and 18th century. I mobilize Slavoj Žižek, Erenesto Laclau, and Louis Althusser’s t...

Hindu Medicine

Hindu medicine correctly judged by him is a composite system. It consists of a Dravidian system on which was superimposed an Aryan system on which in its turn was superimposed a Buddhist system. The Dravidian system centres round Dhanvantari who does not figure in the vedic pantheon of the Aryan immigrants. He is one of the 14 jewels churned out of the milky ocean at the beginning of time when ...

Brass,Hindu-Muslim Violence

Reflections on Hindu Theology