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In the twenty-first century, there has been a seismic shift in Indian political, religious and social life. The country's guiding spirit was formerly a fusion of the anti-caste worldview of B.R. Ambedkar; the inclusive Hinduism of Mahatma Gandhi; and the agnostic secularism of Jawaharlal Nehru. Today, that fusion has given way to Hindutva. This now-dominant version of Hinduism blends the militant nationalism of V.D. Savarkar; the Brahmanical anti-minorityism of M.S. Golwalkar; and the global Islamophobia of India's ruling regime. This riveting book connects Hindu religious nationalism with the cultural politics of everyday India.

In the twenty-first century, there has been a seismic shift in Indian political, religious and social life. The country's guiding spirit was formerly a fusion of the anti-caste worldview of B.R. Ambedkar; the inclusive Hinduism of Mahatma Gandhi; and the agnostic secularism of Jawaharlal Nehru. Today, that fusion has given way to Hindutva. This now-dominant version of Hinduism blends the militant nationalism of V.D. Savarkar; the Brahmanical anti-minorityism of M.S. Golwalkar; and the global Islamophobia of India's ruling regime. This riveting book connects Hindu religious nationalism with the cultural politics of everyday India.

Essays on colonial Bengal, India

This article focuses on 'Love Jihad,' the neologism that Hindutva, or Hindu Extremism, has invented to incite suspicion and violence against Indian Muslims. I begin with a brief discussion of several characteristics of the Hindutva organisational and ideological apparatus. Then I discuss anti-Love Jihad campaigns as a strategy to assert Hindu extremism in interpersonal relations. I go on to highlight specific episodes of 'Love Jihad' attacks by the Hindu Right that have targeted and made a political spectacle of love and marriage across community boundaries. I suggest that Love Jihad campaigns become a mode of producing docile, submissive subjects who will not question regimes of power, be it neoliberalism, religious majoritarianism or social hierarchies and injustice.

La extrema derecha hindú llegó al poder en India en 2014 y en la actualidad controla un buen número de estados de la Unión, además de ostentar el gobierno federal. Esto ha contraído una serie de cambios en las reglas del juego político en el país. La primera parte de mi artículo indica el alcance de este poder, sus consecuencias inmediatas y aquellas otras a largo plazo. Haré una semblanza histórica del extremismo hindú, así como del desarrollo de su estructura a lo largo de nueve décadas. Finalmente me centraré en dos casos instigados contra las minorías religiosas y la libertad de pensamiento y elección, explicaré su relevancia en los planes de la derecha hindú y el lugar que ocupan en su estrategia. ; Hindu extremism captured state power in India in 2014, and, at present, it controls a large number of regional states as well as leading the ruling coalition at the Centre. This has led to significant and wide ranging changes in Indian polity and in political norms and values, and the first part of my article will briefly indicate their range, immediate consequences and long term implications. I will outline the historical evolution, and unpack the structural distinctiveness, of the Hindu Far Right to explore its mobilisational strategies and its ideological agenda over nine decades. In the final part, I will focus on two specific sites of violent hate crimes against religious minorities and against freedom of individual and collective thought and choice.I will finally try and explain their relevance to the larger agenda of the Hindu Right and their broad direction.

Sarkar's article looks at the Hindu ritual of widow immolation, which colonial law abolished in 1830. It explores the administration of the ritual before abolition and how, in the process of governance, the widow's consent emerged as a prominent keyword in colonial bureaucratic discourses. It shows the ramifications of the concept of consent, the problem of establishing it, and the consequences of applying it.

The article straddles two separate but intertwined registers. One is the interface between faith and law under early colonial rule. I explore this through the lens of colonial governance of immolations of Hindu widows. The other is the gradual transmutation of an idea or a word: consent, the widow's consent to burning alive. The early colonial state formally institutionalised the widow's consent as the basis for all lawful immolations. That, I argue, eventuated, over a long stretch of time, and through a strangely twisted dialectic, in a horizon of female entitlements and immunities. Controversially but recognisably, she became the bearer of something like rights rather than of sacred prescriptions and injunctions alone. This was a development that neither the state nor its Brahman ritual specialists had actually intended.

Until it was ousted from power in the 2004 elections, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) -- the electoral wing of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) -- was a central player in Indian right-wing politics. The creation & development of the RSS is chronicled, as well as its growing support for militant Hindu extremism. In addition, the evolution of transclass electoral support for the BJP & the endorsement of Western investors -- despite its claims to be opposed to Western imperialism & values -- are explored. K. Hyatt Stewart

The essay identifies previously unnoticed signposts charting the construction of women in nineteenth‐century Bengal as autonomous, self‐possessed persons, with entitlements to an intellectual life and immunities against physical and sexual death. Out of these claims, the notion of the female citizen would emerge as a coherent and convincing possibility in the next century. This essay focuses on three pieces of colonial legislation, on specific court cases and social reform movements, and finally, on women's self‐narrativisation against these developments. Laws resonant in the emergent public sphere weakened the absolute authority of norms, while the multivocal public sphere interrogated the jurisdiction of colonial laws. Thus, neither norms nor laws could claim the hegemony that earlier religious prescriptions had possessed because of the symbiosis between legality and morality. This breakdown of the hegemony of religious precepts and laws thus created a space for women's self‐creation as autonomous subjects.