HINDUTVA 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...

Neo-Hindu Fundamentalism Challenging the Secular and Pluralistic Indian State "2279

Secularism seems to require separation between religion and State. Regarding India, it would be better to speak of ‘equidistance’ between State and religious denominations. Nonetheless a ‘balanced treatment’ towards the religions leaves the question open as to what form that equidistance should take. This is the reason of some contradictions in today’s Indian social and political life. It is li...

Arabesk: Music and nationalism

Nationalism and Separatism

Th e historical era following World War II is often referred to as the era of decolonization, the time when the former European powers, as well as America and Japan, gave up their overseas empires and dozens of new sovereign countries came into being. However, it could just as easily be called the era of nationalist separatism, as the sheer number of ethnic and pan-ethnic movements seeking inde...