Violent Gods: Hindu Nationalism in India's Present (PB)

This book is an erudite and elegiac exploration of Hindu nationalism in India today. It offers a revealing account of Hindu militant mobilizations as an authoritarian movement manifest throughout culture, polity, and economy, religion and law, class and caste, on gender, body, land, and memory. Tracing the continuities between Hindutva and Hindu cultural dominance, this book maps the architectures of civic and despotic governmentalities contouring Hindu nationalism in public, domestic, and everyday life. In chronicling concerted action against Christians and Muslims, Adivasis and Dalits, through spectacles, events, public executions, the riots in Kandhamal of December 2007 and August-September 2008, the planned, methodical politics of terror unfolds in its multiple registers. At the intersections of Anthropology, Postcolonial, Subaltern, and South Asia Studies, Angana P. Chatterji asks critical questions of nation making, cultural nationalism, and subaltern disenfranchisement. As a Foucauldian history of the present, this text asserts the role of ethical knowledge production as counter-memory.

CONTENTS

Gratitude

One: Memory-Mournings

Explanations
Text, Counter-Memory
Why Orissa?
HinduCultural Dominance, Hindutva/ization
Secularization
Biopolitics

Two: Dispositif

Roots
Stratagem
Nationscapes in Ascendancy
‘Paradesi’
‘Paraaya’
Normativity

Three: Impunity

Dislocation-IndoctriNation
Education
Governance
Economies of Violence
Dispossession
Struggles Over Land

Four: Erasures

In Jagatsinghpur, Jesus is the Son of a Subaltern God
Conversion/‘Re’conversion
‘Where Is Your God Now?’
Nation’s ‘Other’
A Collision of Histories

Five: Processions of Violence

Absences
Riots in Kandhamal, December 2007
‘Violent Gods’: Riots in Kandhamal, August 2008

Bibliography
Index

Cover: In the Name of God, 2008. Mixed Media drawing by Arpana Caur.