Suchergebnisse

Vinayak Damodar Savarkar was the theorizer of Hindutva (1923)—the project to radically reconfigure India as a Hindu majoritarian state. Assessments of Savarkar's earlierThe Indian War of Independence(1909), a history of the 1857 Indian "Mutiny," have generally subsumed this tract into the logic of Hindutva. This article offers a reassessment ofThe Indian War of Independenceand situates it within the political and intellectual context offin de sièclewestern India. I suggest that this history of Indian rebellion propagated a novel iteration of Indian popular sovereignty predicated on Hindu–Muslim unity. I read Savarkar as adapting the ideas of Giuseppe Mazzini and Johann Kaspar Bluntschli to challenge what he regarded as the fissiparous logic of late colonial liberalism. Finally, this article argues that Savarkar's account of the mutual constitution of general will and the personalism of sovereignty must be read as a previously unacknowledged instance of Indian populism.

The recent conquest of political power in Maharashtra by the Shiv Sena-BJP combine was premised upon the advances made by these parties into the rural districts of the state in the late 1980s. This political expansion was made possible by a growing dissatisfaction with the immobility of the Congress organisation, which in the course of the 1980s proved incapable of incorporating the new upwardly mobile groups thrown up by the intensified commercialisation in the rural areas. Taking four village studies in the Aurangabad region as its point of departure, the article argues that it was the Shiv Sena's and BJP's successful assumption of the discourse of 'aggressive Hindus' in a region marked by long-standing communal tension, along with a growing opposition to ineffective Congress policies in the region, which made the region into a stronghold of the two hitherto urban-based parties. It is finally argued that it was especially the Shiv Sena's translation of the Hindutva discourse into the dominant political idiom of Maratha valour and rustic virtues, rather than the Ramjanmabhoomi agitation, that provided a crucial impetus to Hindu communal politics in the state.

Arkotong Longkumer, The Greater India Experiment: Hindutva and the Northeast. Delhi: Navayana, 2022, 336 pp., ₹599.