Hindutva’s Blood
© 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 a...
| Main Authors: | , |
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
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OpenEdition
2021
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| Online Access: | https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/134399 |
| _version_ | 1826210999094476800 |
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| author | Banerjee, Dwaipayan Copeman, Jacob |
| author_facet | Banerjee, Dwaipayan Copeman, Jacob |
| author_sort | Banerjee, Dwaipayan |
| collection | MIT |
| description | © 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. |
| first_indexed | 2024-09-23T14:58:47Z |
| format | Article |
| id | mit-1721.1/134399 |
| institution | Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
| language | English |
| last_indexed | 2024-09-23T14:58:47Z |
| publishDate | 2021 |
| publisher | OpenEdition |
| record_format | dspace |
| spelling | mit-1721.1/1343992021-10-28T03:29:50Z Hindutva’s Blood Banerjee, Dwaipayan Copeman, Jacob © 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. 2021-10-27T20:04:50Z 2021-10-27T20:04:50Z 2020 2021-07-06T18:46:48Z Article http://purl.org/eprint/type/JournalArticle https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/134399 en 10.4000/SAMAJ.6657 South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ application/pdf OpenEdition South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal |
| spellingShingle | Banerjee, Dwaipayan Copeman, Jacob Hindutva’s Blood |
| title | Hindutva’s Blood |
| title_full | Hindutva’s Blood |
| title_fullStr | Hindutva’s Blood |
| title_full_unstemmed | Hindutva’s Blood |
| title_short | Hindutva’s Blood |
| title_sort | hindutva s blood |
| url | https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/134399 |
| work_keys_str_mv | AT banerjeedwaipayan hindutvasblood AT copemanjacob hindutvasblood |