One Country, Many Ideas

Most schools of thought in India have their own definitions of freedom, and more often than not, their respective ideologies end up challenging one another. Our country is unique in that is serves as one of the best examples of both unity and division.

Ranging from similar to contrasting, the following books explore the wide range of ideas and practices in India:

The End of Karma: Hope and Fury Among India’s Young
Somini Sengupta

A penetrating, personal look at contemporary India – a snapshot of the world’s largest democracy at a moment of transition.The End of Karma explores India through the lens of young people from different worlds: a Maoist rebel; a woman killed because she married the ‘wrong’ man; a teenage girl who needles her dad to let her become a police officer. Driven by aspiration – and thwarted by state and society – they are making new demands on India’s democracy for equality of opportunity, dignity for girls, and civil liberties. Somini Sengupta spotlights these stories of ordinary men and women, weaving together a ground-breaking portrait of a country in turmoil.

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Gita Press and the Making of Hindu India
Akshaya Mukul

In the early 1920s, Jaydayal Goyandka and Hanuman Prasad Poddar, two Marwari businessmen-turned-spiritualists, set up the Gita Press and Kalyan magazine. As of early 2014, Gita Press had sold close to 72 million copies of the Gita, 70 million copies of Tulsidas’s works and 19 million copies of scriptures like the Puranas and Upanishads. And while most other journals of the period, whether religious, literary or political, survive only in press archives, Kalyan now has a circulation of over 200,000, and its English counterpart, Kalyana-Kalpataru, of over 100,000. Gita Press created an empire that spoke in a militant Hindu nationalist voice and imagined a quantifiable, reward-based piety. Almost every notable leader and prominent voice, including Mahatma Gandhi, was roped in to speak for the cause. Cow slaughter, Hindi as national language and the rejection of Hindustani, the Hindu Code Bill, the creation of Pakistan, India’s secular Constitution: Kalyan and Kalyana-Kalpataru were the spokespersons of the Hindu position on these and other matters. The ideas articulated by Gita Press and its publications played a critical role in the formation of a Hindu political consciousness, indeed a Hindu public sphere. This history provides new insights into the complicated and contested rise to political pre-eminence of the Hindu Right. Gita Press and the Making of Hindu India is an original, eminently readable and deeply researched account of one of the most influential publishing enterprises in the history of modern India. Featuring an extraordinary cast of characters – buccaneering entrepreneurs and hustling editors, nationalist ideologues and religious fanatics – this is essential (and exciting) reading for our times.

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But You Don’t Look Like a Muslim
Rakhshanda Jalil

What does it mean to be Muslim in India? What does it mean to look like one’s religion? Does one’s faith determine how one is perceived? Is there a secular ideal one is supposed to live up to? Can people of different faiths have a shared culture, a shared identity? India has, since time immemorial, been plural, multi-cultural, multi-ethnic and multi-lingual, where various streams have fed into and strengthened each other, and where dissimilarities have always been a cause for rejoicing rather than strife. These writings, on and about being Muslim in India, by Rakhshanda Jalil – one of the country’s foremost literary historians and cultural commentators – excavate memories, interrogate dilemmas, and rediscover and celebrate a nation and its syncretic culture. But You Don’t Look Like a Muslim is a book that every thinking Indian must read.

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Hindutva or Hind Swaraj
U.R. Ananthamurthy

Born out of a meditation on the ideas of the nation state and nationalism, and what the new power structures and centres mean for the very idea of India, Hindutva or Hind Swaraj is a manifesto – written in the form of aphorisms, using shifting tones and styles to make a deep, elegant and heartfelt point about the human cost of radicalization. This last work of Jnanpith award winner and pre-eminent writer U.R. Ananthamurthy is a creative response to the rise of Hindutva nationalism in India. Juxtaposing V.D. Savarkar’s idea of Hindutva with M.K. Gandhi’s concept of Hind Swaraj, the book examines the two directions that were open to India at the time of Independence.

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Majoritarian State: How Hindu Nationalism Is Changing India
Edited by J. Christophe, T. Blom & A.P. Chatterji

Majoritarian State traces the ascendance of Hindu nationalism in contemporary India. Led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the BJP administration has established an ethno-religious and populist style of rule since 2014. Its agenda is also pursued beyond the formal branches of government, as the new dispensation portrays conventional social hierarchies as intrinsic to Indian culture while condoning communal and caste- and gender-based violence. The contributors explore how Hindutva ideology has permeated the state apparatus and formal institutions, and how Hindutva activists exert control over civil society via vigilante groups, cultural policing and violence. Groups and regions portrayed as enemies of the Indian state are the losers in a new order promoting the interests of the urban middle class and business elites. As this majoritarian ideology pervades the media and public discourse, it also affects the judiciary, universities and cultural institutions, increasingly captured by Hindu nationalists. Dissent and difference are silenced and debate increasingly sidelined as the press is muzzled or intimidated in the courts. Internationally, the BJP government has emphasised hard power and a fast expanding security state. This collection of essays offers rich empirical analysis and documentation to investigate the causes and consequences of the illiberal turn taken by the worlds largest democracy.

Available here

The Virtual Hindu Rashtra: Saffron Nationalism and New Media
Rohit Chopra

From websites devoted to battling a ‘Left-liberal’ media ecosystem to the formidable internet army of Hindu Right volunteers, from online narratives of Hindu valour to Narendra Modi’s impeccably-managed social media presence, new media is an integral part of present-day Hindu nationalism. The Virtual Hindu Rashtra examines the relationship of Hindu nationalism and new media across a range of internet spaces, including Twitter trends in support of the Bharatiya Janata Party’s government policies, Facebook pages dedicated to the cultural project of establishing a Hindu state, and WhatsApp groups circulating jokes about Modi’s critics. Situating online Hindu nationalism in a historical context, this book analyses the movement with respect to national and global political trends, such as the rise of authoritarian political personalities worldwide and the phenomenon of fake news. The book concludes with a reflection on the implications of the relationship of Hindu nationalism and new media for democracy in India.

Available here

2019: How Modi Won India
Rajdeep Sardesai

On 23 May 2019, when the results of the general elections were announced, Narendra Modi and the BJP-led NDA coalition were voted back to power with an overwhelming majority. To some, the numbers of Modi’s victory came as something of a surprise; for others, the BJP’s triumph was a vindication of their belief in the government and its policies. Irrespective of one’s political standpoint, one thing was beyond dispute: this was a landmark verdict, one that deserved to be reported and analysed with intelligence – and without bias. Rajdeep Sardesai’s new book, 2019: How Modi Won India, does just that. What was it that gave Modi an edge over the opposition for the second time in five years? How was the BJP able to trounce its rivals in states that were once Congress bastions? What was the core issue in the election: a development agenda or national pride? As he relives the excitement of the many twists and turns that took place over the last five years, culminating in the 2019 election results, Rajdeep helps the reader make sense of the contours and characteristics of a rapidly changing India, its politics and its newsmakers. If the 2014 elections changed India, 2019 may well have defined what ‘new India’ is likely to be all about. 2019: How Modi Won India takes a look at that fascinating story, which is still developing.

Available here

What the Nation Really Needs to Know: The JNU Nationalism Lectures
Edited by JNUTA

Who or what is ‘anti-national’? The question was foregrounded in a series of unprecedented events that unfolded in Jawaharlal Nehru University from February 2016. Over the next few months, sections of the television, print and social media turned the country into a choric chamber of hate, riveting national attention. The proliferating ‘charges’ produced great political and intellectual disquiet in the JNU community of students and teachers. As a creative response, the Jawaharlal Nehru University Teachers’ Association organized a teach-in for a month between 17 February and 17 March 2016. The lectures addressed the meanings, histories and experience of nationalism, and its unresolved dilemmas, in India and beyond. The teach-in lectures, which were initially intended for members of the JNU community, and delivered principally by JNU teachers, soon gained unanticipated audiences across India and in international forums. Reports and translations of the lectures, live streamed on YouTube, made for a reach that echoed well beyond the ‘Freedom Square’, the area in front of JNU’s Administrative Block, which became the space of this intellectual and political occupation. The book, therefore, is both an archive of that historic moment and a tribute to the effort that succeeded in refocusing national attention on the university as the space for sustaining serious, well-historicized and critical thought.

Available here

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