Distinguished historian Tanika Sarkar has been publishing on Hindu nationalism for nearly four decades. The eight essays collected in Hindu Nationalism in India were written between 1991 and 2022 and focus on the dynamics of the rise and expansion of Hindu nationalist pedagogy and popular mobilisation. More specifically, they explore the methods and strategies of various affiliates of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) for popular mobilisation with regard to women, children and education, especially discourses on the past and history. In terms of method, they offer a blend of ethnography, contemporary media analysis and literary criticism, along with the usual tools of a gender-sensitive social and cultural historian.
Sarkar offers useful insights into the changing trajectory of Hindu nationalism. She observes, for example, that pedagogy in RSS-run schools does not advocate any major departure from mainstream nationalist thinking but only enforces an erasure of the multiplicity of possibilities within the latter. The chapter on the Rashtra Sevika Samiti likewise shows that the occasional encouragement to women’s participation in public life is often predicated on prior formal approval of traditional patriarchal structures.
RSS members show their physical skills at a gathering in Kolkata. | Photo Credit: Getty Images
Looking closely into the rhetorical tropes and representational strategies of Hindu nationalism, Sarkar traces how and when such strategies diverge. In 1999, when the BJP was in power, Sarkar observed the earlier prominence of the women activists decline, arguably because women’s organisations were perceived as containers of ideological purity. It will be interesting to study the Rashtra Sevika Samiti again today when Hindu nationalism reigns supreme. Has it receded into obscurity, even as a woman has been made the President of the country?
Against individual rights
Hindu nationalist formations calibrate such contradictory positions largely in response to changing political or electoral prospects. Sarkar makes a distinction between the electoral and cultural affiliation to Hindu nationalism. The various mass fronts of the RSS often air different, even contradictory, positions to address mutually hostile constituencies, minimising the need for the voters to subscribe to extremist cultural positions. It partly explains the expanding social base of Hindu nationalism, which earlier came from small-town and upper-caste but has lately penetrated the metropolitan middle class. Nonetheless, Sarkar argues that Hindu nationalism has consistently maintained an essential opposition to the politics of individual rights as an alien concept.
A protester holds a banner during a rally against a spate of violent attacks across the country targetting the country’s Muslim minority, in New Delhi. | Photo Credit: AP
Sarkar is unsparing in the three essays on the Hindu nationalist perception of history, arguing that Hindutva’s particular representation of the past, marked most clearly by the demonisation of the Muslim, is simultaneously its medium and message. Its most distinctive feature is an effortless conflation of the sacred and the human and circulation beyond the educational institutions into the public domain through innovative technologies, well-oiled organisations and rigorous repetition.
In terms of academic nuance and literary pleasure, the chapter on the conflicted career of Bankim Chandra Chatterjee’s novel Anandamath is the most rewarding, as a perspicacious take on a founding text on Hindu nationalism and on the ambivalences of mainstream nationalism in early 20th century India.
Anyone looking to understand the rise of Hindu nationalism in India will do well to read these challenging essays for themselves. Aparna Basu’s synoptic introduction will be useful to the general reader otherwise unfamiliar with Sarkar’s work.
Hindu Nationalism in India; Tanika Sarkar, Permanent Black/Ashoka University, ₹695.
The reviewer specialises in cultural histories of caste in modern India, teaches history at the Kalinga Institute of Social Sciences, Bhubaneswar and runs a podcast called HistoryChatter.
