Hindutva’s Blood
Name
samaj-6657.pdf
Description
Published version
Size
426.91 KB
Format
Unknown
Checksum (MD5)
1237ec43eef03e81897b641a4b6e1af4
Author(s)
Banerjee, Dwaipayan
Copeman, Jacob
Date Issued
2020
Journal
South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal
Publisher
OpenEdition
Version
Final published version
Abstract
© This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. In this article we examine blood as a medium and metaphor for Hindutva's political transactions. Specifically, we identify three ways in which blood operates in Hindutva thought and practice. First, it serves to create a spatial geographic whole - an original Hindu nation whose inhabitants share the same blood. Second, blood serves to mediate between the violent and non-violent aspects of Hindu nationalism, authorizing and reconciling present acts of violence with a supposed Hindu capacity for heroic restraint. And third, blood serves to establish a temporal continuum between a Hindutva past, present and future, writing Hindu nationalist thought and action backwards into Indian history, and forwards to threaten future bloodshed against non-adherents. In these three ways, Hindutva imaginations and extractions of blood work through each other. In present-day India, these three political manifestations of blood - as a marker of exclusion, as mediating non-violence, and as premonitory threat - have all appeared in the Citizenship Amendment Act controversy and around the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic. As blood overflows through time and space, it threatens to erase difference and legitimize violence while further extending the ideology's reach.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Program in Science, Technology and Society
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.4000/SAMAJ.6657
