In his review of Yogendra Yadav’s 2020 book, Ramachandra Guha makes a striking observation on the prevailing scholarship on Indian politics. He remarks that Yadav’s writing in the early 2000s was representative of an entire class of Indian scholars who underestimated the potential of Hindu nationalism to grow and expand beyond its traditional social base. Guha acknowledged that this is true of his own earlier writings as well and arose from an inflated faith in the potential of Indian democracy and its institutions.Tanika Sarkar’s latest offering, Hindu Nationalism in India, a collection of eight essays on different aspects of Hindu nationalism written between 1991 and 2021, stands directly in contrast to the complacency that Guha alluded to. Writing in 2005, in the immediate context of the unexpected electoral defeat of the first NDA government, Sarkar recognised and highlighted the effort and potential of the numerous grassroot organisations of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) to establish Hindutva as the moral compass of most Hindus in India, despite electoral results and reversals.Fifteen years later, as Hindu nationalism occupies the centre stage of India’s political, electoral and cultural landscape, this collection of essays by one of Hindutva’s finest scholars unravels the ideological and organisational underpinnings of the Hindutva hegemony.Tanika SarkarHindu Nationalism in IndiaPermanent Black (July 2022)The subject matter of the essays ranges from an analysis of the novel Anandmath (1882) to an ethnographic analysis of RSS-run schools. While the chapters may seem disconnected, written as they were in very different contexts, they reflect the vastness as well as the incoherence of the Hindutva project itself. As the author suggests in the preface, the decision to include the essays in their original forms is to help the reader savour the zest of the time and travel through different stages of the most eventful three decades in the life of Hindutva and concurrently, Indian politics.The approachTanika Sarkar outlines her approach to the study of Hindutva in her essay titled pragmatics of the Hindu right by stating her discomfort with the existing critiques of Hindutva. She first makes an important distinction between the identity “the nature or essential characteristics of a particular kind of politics” and the display “the rhetorical tropes, representational strategies and ideological manoeuvres” of the Hindu right.According to her, most critiques of the Hindu right assume essential views about its identity without probing into its actual social composition. The Hindutva identity, in such understanding, is inhabited by everything that we do not like, from being lumpen agents of Indian or foreign capital to reactionary responses to god-less secularism or distorted forms of post-modernist excess.Sarkar does not dispute the substantive conclusions of these critiques of the Hindu right but disputes this methodological assumption of the Hindutva identity as always and already known. Given these a priori notions of the identity of Hindu right, Sarkar suggests that the display of Hindutva is outrightly dismissed as irrelevant, at best a mask or cover, by the scholars without probing into its social function. Sarkar then outlines her objective of understanding the structural relationship between the identity and display, and the dialectics between them to understand the specific history and social composition of the Hindu right, to understand it as a political problem rather than an existential one.This methodological approach that explores the changing relationship between identity and display runs across the essays in the book. While the chapters on Anandmath, historiography, and problems of social power, critically explore the ideological components of the Hindu identity, the three chapters on Hindutva women organisations and RSS schools closely look at the dynamics of its display and its changing articulations and emphasis in different contexts.For instance, Sarkar notes the striking shift in the self-representation of the women in the RSS-affiliated Rashtra Sevika Samiti (henceforth Samiti), from being the fierce militant icons of communal battle to the figure of faithful mothers as keepers of Hindu values in the domestic sphere. She points out that the retreat of the Samiti into the domestic space is the result of the deliberate effort of the RSS to deter the growth of gender concerns within the Sangh in the broader context of the need to push increasing participation of women in electoral politics.The Sangh carefully insulates BJP’s women politicians from the Samiti, and the Samiti experiences a continuous decline in its membership. Sarkar illustrates the paradox of retreat and the decline of the Samiti while all other Sangh affiliates are on a steady rise to highlight the inherent tension within the Hindutva discourse on the problem of social power (eg. gender). The Samiti is transformed and contracts itself as the custodian of the essential Sangh values in the domestic spaces, in a conjecture where Hindutva politics expanded to new electoral and political terrain.Also read: Ambassadors of Hindutva: How Saffron Has Seeped Into Our Diplomatic SpaceWhile a host of ethnographic studies on Hindu nationalism has paid attention to the intricacies of Hindutva’s display, what makes Sarkar’s approach unique is the accessibility of her writing and the ability to not lose sight of the majoritarian inner-core of the Hindu nationalist project, simultaneously paying attention to the nuances and details of its self-representation. Unlike many other academic studies, her analysis is neither lost in the inaccessible jargon of anthropological analysis nor becomes a sophisticated reproduction of Hindutva’s categories and self-description. This methodological prowess also enables Sarkar to shift her attention from three overdetermined sites in the study of Hindu nationalism, namely elections, violence, and personality cults.To capture the comprehensiveness of the Hindutva project, Sarkar undertakes the hefty daunting task of transgressing disciplinary boundaries. The RSS network pervades the categories of social, political, cultural, literary and economic that forms the core of our disciplinary distinctions and boundaries. Sarkar goes beyond her discipline of social history, takes up the job of an ethnographer and combines insights from literary studies and rigorous historical analysis to provide an incisive inquiry of what she describes as the “larger unnamed struggle that the Sangh is engaged in to reorient the discursive order of power relations in the Hindu Rashtra of its dreams”.Change and continuity The fact that the book was written over the last three decades is very significant as it conveys to the reader what has changed and what has not in Hindu nationalist politics over this critical period. This contrasts recent scholarly interventions that overarchingly emphasise the newness in contemporary Hindutva, often losing sight of its continuities. Most importantly, Sarkar does not posit Hindu nationalism as a break in the trajectory of Indian politics but locates it within the limits and possibilities, tensions and contradictions embedded in colonial and postcolonial Indian politics and society.For instance, the essay on Anandmath illustrates how the Hindu nationalists instrumentalise the fault lines within literary imaginations, mainstreamed by the nationalist movement. The figure of Bharat Mata and the song ‘Vande Mataram’ as national symbols are evoked to obliterate the original anti-Muslim context of the novel. Independent India adopted the first two stanzas of ‘Vande Mataram’ as the official song. This illustrates the larger point that Sarkar elaborates in the final essay in the volume that RSS and Hindu nationalism have grown through inheriting the tension and possibilities in mainstream Indian nationalism. As mainstream nationalism never bifurcated faith and political nationalism completely, and instead carried hospitable elements for cultural nationalism within it, the Hindu nationalists successfully appropriated it.Kudumbashree workers prepapre national flags for the ‘Har Ghar Tiranga’ campaign ahead of India’s 75th Independence Day, in Kochi on August 9. Photo: PTIThe essay on love jihad further helps the reader to locate Hindu nationalism in the continuing fault lines of Indian society. While love jihad is undoubtedly a Hindutva invention, Sarkar emphasises that it is built on a “tenacious historical tradition and entrenched social values existing in our [caste] society”. While building on the continuities of policing love across borders, Sarkar notes a significant discursive difference between policing inter-caste marriages and the love jihad trope that polices inter-religious marriages. As the Hindutva rhetoric projects Hindus as a single indivisible and organic entity, it does not generate a political campaign over inter-caste marriages. While the policing of inter-caste love is done through familial and community spaces, inter-religious love becomes the site of active political campaigns.Sarkar notes that, in this way, the love jihad campaign is a continuity of the social norms that proscribe love beyond borders, while simultaneously serving Hindutva’s objective of the depoliticisation of inter-caste conflict and the recasting of inter-religious conflicts as the centre of political mobilisation.The essays on Vande Mataram and Love Jihad make it clear that Hindu nationalism’s real appeal derives from the fact that “it works along the grain of, rather than against, long-held and much cherished social and moral norms and beliefs”. While firmly placing the popularity of Hindutva in the continuities of our society’s fault lines, Sarkar is also attentive to the change and newness it brings to the Indian social psyche through its relentless and unremitting organisational labour. Sarkar notes that the growing appeal of Hindutva is not primarily due to the innate compulsions of its ideology of communal authoritarianism but because of its multi-dimensional and all-encompassing organisational network that overcompensates its thin and one-dimensional ideology of hatred and majoritarianism.Organisation: The multiplex of HindutvaSarkar identifies the RSS-led nationalist movement’s organisational network as the fundamental distinguishing factor from all other political formations in India. This network, which she describes as a multiplex, ranges from the BJP to numerous unknown organisations that sustain the contemporary growth of Hindutva ideology. As Sarkar puts it, “Hindutva’s organisational apparatus is the oldest, the most continuous, and certainly the most multifarious political formation in the world devoted to the service of mobilising hatred.”Two underlying bits of logic for the pervasiveness of the network emerge in Sarkar’s essays. Firstly, it is built on an uncannily Gramscian principle, which is to build hegemony through an incredibly patient and long-term strategy of molecular transformation. Secondly, according to the RSS, the Hindus constitute an indivisible and organic unity, which in reality, is highly hierarchical and structured on caste. The Sangh organisations then become a means to build continuity and indivisibility within Hindus; therefore, there are RSS affiliates for every possible social group that we can think of, including an organisation of physically and visually-challenged Hindus called Sakshama. Attention to this underlying logics of organisational activities informs the chapters on the Samiti and dissemination of RSS history at the grassroots.Also read: How Did Savarkar, a Staunch Supporter of British Colonialism, Come to Be Known as ‘Veer’?While discussing the increasing popularity of the skewed history manufactured by RSS, Sarkar notes that their success lies not in the content but in the modes of disseminating history. While the complex and nuanced scholarly understanding of history written by left–secular historians has been confined to the realm of the academic world, Hindutva history “seep[s] into the minute pores of Indian Society, forming cells within religion, charity, culture, education, leisure; among women, students, Adivasis/tribals, Dalits/untouchable castes, urban and rural workers, army personnel, lawyers”.Sarkar argues that the sheer quantity, continuity and intensity of the work, the massive cadre base that produces and generates historical narratives, makes the difference. This conclusion on the success of Hindutva’s history holds true for the hegemony of Hindutva in general, and it is mainly orchestrated by its insidious organisational network.The extensive attention to the organisational underpinnings of RSS is one of the book’s greatest strengths as it corresponds to Sarkar’s approach of seriously analysing the display of Hindutva. The RSS and affiliates seek to transform the entire society into its image and subsume it within its network of a totalitarian family. Therefore, attention to the organisational structure is central to making sense of the project of Hindu nationalist politics. The book doesn’t adequately inform the reader about the geographical vastness and regional diversity of Hindu nationalist organisational life, as Sarkar’s fieldwork was confined to Delhi’s urban settings. However, her analysis provides critical insights into Hindutva’s manoeuvre to adapt to diverse circumstances, primarily owing to its unique organisational structure. To summarise, it is the medium of the organisational network not the message of Hindutva alone that accounts for its hegemony in contemporary India.In many ways, this collection of essays is a timely prod for all those who love to hate Hindutva without actually attempting to understand its realities. Intellectual historian Jyotirmaya Sharma once remarked that the first hurdle in constituting a language of dissent is the problem of caricaturing the “enemy”. We often get obsessed and then exhausted in fighting the caricature of the enemy, while the enemy only keeps getting stronger. Anyone who seeks to overcome this problem of caricaturing the enemy should read this book to develop a better understanding, critique, opposition and eventually, an alternative to Hindu nationalism.Dayal Paleri is a PhD scholar at IIT Madras and a Commonwealth split-site fellow at the University of Edinburgh.
