A few hours after Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s landslide win in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, I went with two academic friends to Khadia, an area of Ahmedabad known to be an RSS stronghold. Since the 1970s, Khadia has been a source of unwavering support for the Jan Sangh and later the BJP. In 2026, the Congress Party broke their grip on Khadia in a stunning defeat in the local ward elections. Despite this, Khadia has maintained its reputation as a communal tinderbox that Muslims friends in Ahmedabad tell me never to enter. I did so anyways in 2014, because I wanted to understand how Modi’s most ardent base felt about his election.I was on assignment for an international publication, and my editor wanted me to get quotes from Modi supporters about “India’s vote for economic development.” But none of the people I met in Khadia would speak about that topic. Instead, all I heard were the usual diatribes: We will teach Pakistan and Bangladesh a lesson; Kashmir is ours; the world will finally respect India.I wrote to my editor and pitched an alternative story: could I examine why Modi supporters were so angry, even after a historic win?Unsurprisingly, the answer was no.I thought of this story when reading Brahma Prakash’s terrific new book Spectacle State: How Hindutva Shapes Feeling and Culture published by HarperCollins India. Prakash is a cultural theorist, writer, and an Assistant Professor of Theatre and Performance Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University. He argues that “besides ideology, Hindutva feeds on cultural and aesthetic reservoirs, on conscious, unconscious and irrational behaviours that most often appear in the form of spectacle.” Hindutva is, he writes, “a matter of hurt, heart, and art.”His book examines a wide cross section of cultural products that support the Hindutva movement, from statues to music to theatre. In “Sonic Hindutva and H-Pop,” my favourite chapter in the book, he explores how music creates a sensory, emotive experience where listeners feel simultaneously connected to the Hindutva movement, and also to themselves, to each other, and to an idea of “Hindu-ness.” He cites the example of “bhajan clubbing,” where “devotion is produced like a show” and the traditional calming sound of “Om” is replaced with the more masculine, bass heavy “Boom Boom”. Even if you do not understand the lyrics of the Hindutva bhajans, its tone conveys the message: these are not hymns of peace or tranquility. These are songs of domination.If you do understand the lyrics, you are in for a treat, especially if Muslim bashing is what gets you moving on the dance floor. One hit song, for example, is called “Banaayenge Mandir (we will build the temple)”. In the song “Topiwala”, which has racked up nearly a million listens, the singer Ajit Tandia belts out, “Jis din jaag utha Hindu, anjam bolega, topiwala bhi sir jhukae Hindustan bolega (The day the Hindu awakes, the end result will speak. The man in the cap will say Hindustan with bowed head)”.When people gather in the club, and dance to songs like “Topiwala,” Hindutva becomes more than a set of political beliefs; it becomes what a person feels. For Prakash, the goal is to widen the Hindu-Muslim divide, and to create a feeling of victimhood among Hindus. “Hindutva has to constantly harden the identity of ‘us’ and ‘them’ to make itself relevant,” he writes.After I read Prakash’s book, I began to think that what journalists – myself including – should have asked Modi supporters is how he made them feel. It is not that the concerns of roti, kapda aur makaan did not matter to the voters I met in Khadia. But for them, Modi’s win – and the rise of Hindutva – is a total body experience: it is the songs they dance to, the stories they tell, and the way their hearts connect to each other.I realise it sounds ridiculous writing about hearts connecting and ardent Hindu nationalism in the same sentence, especially given the violence the Hindutva movement continues to commit. But the real strength of Prakash’s book is that he pushes us to complicate our thinking. Two competing truths can be true: a young Hindu bashing Muslims can be filled with hatred; that same Hindu, though, can also be filled with love – love for a song, an experience, a story, a symbol, a statue, a connection. Both emotions are valid, and as Prakash writes convincingly in his book, if we are serious about uprooting fascism, we must begin with a basic acknowledgement for other people’s complexities, even if we find their views disagreeable.In many ways, Prakash’s book reminded me of Among the Thugs, Bill Buford’s brilliant examination of British football hooliganism. Buford, an American journalist, embedded himself with some of the most notoriously violent football fans in his pursuit to understand crowd violence. His conclusion is that football fans wreak havoc because “they do it for the same reason that another generation drank too much, or smoked dope, or took hallucinogenic drugs, or behaved badly or rebelliously. Violence is their antisocial kick, their mind-altering experience, an adrenaline-induced euphoria that might be all the more powerful because it is generated by the body itself.”In Spectacle State, Prakash always returns to the body. Hindutva has appeal because it understands that political speech has its limits. Its primary vehicle is through the transformation of symbols that have resonance on a bodily level. In the chapter ‘Why Does Hindutva Need a Sword’, he examines why the sword has become such a potent symbol for the Hindutva movement, despite the fact that “the sword has no place in modern warfare.” Prakash argues that the sword has been adopted by the Hindutva movement as a symbol because it testifies to their bellicose outlook and posture.In the London Review of Books, Adam Shatz has argued that Israel is always at war because its very existence is predicated on violence with others; without battling Palestinians, or its neighbouring Arab states, Israel can barely justify why it exists. Likewise, Hindutva needs to be in combat with the “outsider” (i.e. the Muslim) because otherwise its edifice and spectacle will crumble. The sword is there because the Muslim exists; if the Muslim disappears, another “outsider” or “threat” will be invented because Hindutva wants and needs to carry the sword. It does this, Prakash says, because at its core, Hindutva lacks a purpose other than combating the very idea of India itself.As he writes, “Hindutva…believes that war is a solution for everything, like the fascists and futurists used to believe that the war was the only way to make progress and was necessary for regeneration.”Spectacle State is strongest when he draws in theory and examples from other contexts. In his discussion of lynching in India, he cites the work of the historian Aparna Vaidik, who has extensively written about the lynchings of Black Americans. Vaidik writes about a nine-year-old boy in America whose parents take him to see a Black man being lynched. After witnessing the lynching, the boy tells his parents, “I have seen a man hanged, now I wish I could see one burned.”For Prakash, he finds an eerie parallel here with India. Lynchings are so common in India, he writes, that we have forgotten the human cost of these killings and instead treat them with the same disregard as a Netflix show playing in the background.Throughout the book, Prakash’s writing is eloquent, erudite and accessible, and I admire how he quotes everyone from Susan Sontag to Michel Foucault. At times, though, I wish he provided more examples to support his arguments. In his chapter on music, for example, I was thoroughly convinced of H-Pop as a force for Hindutva, if only because Prakash quotes so many song lyrics. However, when he makes a similar argument about classical music, I wished for more evidence to support his claim. He argues that “classical music is a Brahmanical appropriation” and that “Carnatic music has also developed its cultural nationalist project, ultimately strengthening the Orientalist idea that Indian music is Hindu music.” I do not doubt these claims, but it would be more useful if he pointed to specific changes at recent classical concerts or from newly released albums that testify to this saffronisation.None of this, however, detracts from what is, in my estimation, a stellar and brave book. After I finished it, I reached out to Prakash with some follow-up questions. His book was released at the apex of the CJP protests at Jantar Mantar, and I wanted to know if that movement made him feel different about his ideas.Prakash told me that the reason he wrote his book is because he is tired of hearing the sentiment that “Hindutva is somewhere else; Hindutva is not me.” One of the most moving sections of the book is where Prakash reveals that members of his own family in Bihar have embraced Hindu nationalist ideas. Instead of condemning or condescending to them, his book instead seeks to understand and to empathise. As Prakash told me, “The issue was becoming more personalised. I saw it affecting my family.”Prakash was also exhausted that many of the books about Hindutva tend to be from Savarna elites. This upper caste gaze often prevents these writers from examining how, as Prakash explained, Hindutva has now positioned itself as being “subaltern”. In his book, he reminds us that, “Nine out of the ten tallest statues in India have been constructed between the years 2022 and 2025.” What is more interesting, he argues, are the lesser well-known statues that have been built since Modi was elected prime minister. Many of these, Prakash writes, have direct symbolism and meaning to lower-caste Hindu communities. The purpose, Prakash says, is “to appropriate and subsume them within the nationalist or Hindutva narratives.” But Prakash reminds us that while Hindutva has now positioned itself as a saviour for India’s subaltern, its history testifies to its allegiance to Brahmin and upper-caste Hindus.As I read his book, the Cockroach Janta Party protests kept building in intensity. I kept returning to the final pages, where Prakash quotes a powerful poem called “Mera hun haq banda hai” (I deserve my right) by a famous Punjabi poet Avtar Singh “Pash”:I have seen your theatre of democracyAfter paying the full-ticket priceNow I deserve my rightTo scream and shoutAnd tear down curtains and throw the chairs out.Prakash visited Janta Mantar several times during the protests because some of his students were part of the movement. When I asked him if the protests made him re-think his book, he reiterated what many CJP leaders have said, that “this is not about one minister or one person. It is about a system that has to be changed.”Prakash now worries that “a backlash will certainly happen”, because “what the government saw in the protests genuinely surprised them.” But he added, “The spectacle is breaking.”Zahir Janmohamed is an assistant professor of English at Bowdoin College. His book, The Permitted Hours: Muslim Life in India’s Hindu Laboratory is forthcoming from Haymarket Books in the US and from Context Books in India.