Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020. 285 pp. US$27.95, paper. ISBN 978-1-4780-1094-4.
Anustup Basu’s absorbing book is the newest addition to the literature on Hindu nationalism, a movement that was “birthed” (to invoke the book’s vocabulary) in colonial India and is now one of the most fertile sources of Islamophobia worldwide. The book is timely, not only because of Hindutva’s recently acquired global political visibility, but also because it allows us to analyze the conditions of the digital age that made possibible this potency, while grounding the analysis in an intellectual genealogy of this majoritarian project. In exploring these dimensions, old and new, Hindutva as Political Monotheism both draws on and marks a departure from the literature on Hindu nationalist thought and practice, dominated by political scientists, historians, and anthropologists.
The book’s argument follows a proposition first explored by Ashis Nandy, that the leading impulse of Hindutva, as an Orientalist construct, was to transform the various traditions, gods, and communities of “Hindus” into followers of a monotheistic, “Abrahamic” religion, mirroring both the hated other of Islam, and the powerful Christianity of the conquering British. Basu acknowledges the debt while recording his critique of Nandy’s position (233, note 143), which invests the non-urban, “traditional” community with all the virtues that modernity and Hindu nationalism would erase in their onward march. Indeed, his elaboration of Nandy’s argument about the making of an “Indian monotheism” departs from it in three ways. To begin with, the genealogy maps out a field of positions, encompassing such diverse figures as Rammohun Roy, Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay, S. Radhakrishnan, Bimal Krishna Matilal, and B. R. Ambedkar (chapters 2 and 3). Second, as this list shows, it takes seriously the Dalit-bahujan critique of the Hindu religion; a quote from Kancha Ilaiah’s anti-Brahminism classic Why I am Not a Hindu opens the book. Third, and most importantly, it shines a light on the differences between the Hindutva of the late twentieth century and the crisis-of-secularism debates that moment provoked (of which Nandy and others were protagonists), and the relentlessly mobile, muscle-and-pixel assemblage that is the new “Hindutva 2.0” (chapter 4).
The difference, argues Basu, is in the dominance of what he calls advertised modernization in the new discursive universe of Hindutva. Drawing on Rancière, he describes this brave new world “as the informational distribution of the Brahminical sensible” (182). The energies in this distribution may “touch” upon the diverse works of the world contagiously, without enclosing them into the truth of a singular and realist Hindu metafiction. This analysis helps us think about the relentless action of this world—the circulation of words and images ranging from the violent to the plainly ridiculous, for example—along with its incredibly flimsy hold on anything resembling the “real world” of kin or stranger relations. The “parabasis” of Hindutva, observes Basu, ensures that much contemporary conversation on history, politics, or culture is a response to its provocations, reproducing its terms even while repudiating them.
True, the irreverent carnivalesque space of the internet presents us with (sometimes political) alternatives to the ubiquitous ressentiment of Hindutva warrior-trolls, but these challenges pale in the face of its protean, slippery character. This is not a unique feature of Hindutva 2.0, Basu notes, connecting the Indian phenomenon with the global rise of the “enjoyable” authoritarian personality, to borrow from William Mazzarella (“Brand(ish)ing the Name, or Why is Trump so Enjoyable?” in Sovereignty Inc.: Three Inquiries into Politics and Enjoyment, University of Chicago Press, 2021). Trump, of course, is exemplary of this “planetary” phenomenon, and Basu makes the connection with a delightful alliteration, characterizing the “Trumpian lie … as a libidinal gesture of pleasure and perpetuation in perilous times” (181). Confronting this new anti-realist politics, the book persuasively argues, may require the anti-realist (Latourian, he suggests) sociology of Hindutva 2.0, one that is adequate to its object’s fugitive affect.
Less persuasive is the reading of Carl Schmitt that inaugurates and frames this argument. The opening chapter reads together the well-known theoretical postulates on political theology and sovereignty in order to establish that Hindutva seeks a “political monotheism” to conform to the prescriptive arc of Western political theory: that all modern political concepts are secularized theological concepts (12), as evidenced in the godlike figure of the sovereign “who decides on the exception,” where the exception in politics is “paralogous” to the miracle in theology (19). A creative interpretation leads Basu to infer that “according to Schmitt, India can be a functional liberal democracy only after it is comfortably Hindu in an originary political sense, and the United States can return to a state of vanilla Rawlsian peace only after the country has been made WASP again” (14). This must strike any reader of Schmitt, even those not named Laclau or Mouffe, as a bit of a leap. Basu goes on to state that “Schmitt’s political theology…necessarily defines the bearer of the political as a monotheistic congregation, jealous of any apostates, pagans, or heretics in its midst” (18). Much of the analytical labour here is performed by an unstated understanding of monotheism itself as something of a pathology, consisting of a “jealous” community hostile to difference. This, of course, is an artefact of the very “religious anthropology” that is decried elsewhere in the book as a discourse whose Orientalist imagination is lodged at the heart of Hindutva. Being aware, perhaps, of the pitfalls of this interpretive exercise, Basu writes that his argument depends on “a sparse invocation” (14), and later, “a provisional dictum extracted from Carl Schmitt” (150). The labour of this extraction, alas, is all too visible.
Fortunately, the most substantive parts of the book (chapters 3 and 4) stand on their own, without the authorizing figure of Schmitt looming over them. Thanks to this, Hindutva as Political Monotheism will remain a valuable study for all those, in South Asia and beyond, interested in thinking “the ground of the present” (10).
Shefali Jha
Dhirubhai Ambani Institute of Information and Communication Technology, Gandhinagar