South Asia in Motion. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2021. x, 321 pp. (Maps, B&W photos, illustrations.) US$30.00, cloth. ISBN 978-1-5036-1422-2.
With the global rise and spread of right-wing populist movements, it is exceptionally rare to find deep, long-term ethnographic engagement with the activists of these movements as well as their target groups. Arkotong Longkumer fills this immense void in the scholarly literature through his careful, astute analysis of the Hindu nationalist movement’s expansion into India’s northeastern frontier. For Longkumer, it is not anti-Muslim rhetoric or electoral incentives for political violence that drive the expansion of Hindutva, literally “Hindu-ness,” into an ex-colonial frontier peopled by Indigenous groups and dominated by Christian churches; instead, Hindutva activists seek in the course of everyday conversations and encounters to painstakingly win over subjects in Northeast India to their ideological vision of “Greater India” (Akhand Bharat). In turn, Northeasterners negotiate with Hindutva—the latest face of Indian statemaking in this frontier bordering China, Myanmar, and Bangladesh—in myriad ways from claiming long-lost historical icons to prophetic hopes for carving out Indigenous sovereignty within a new political order.
Longkumer’s study of Hindu nationalism in Northeast India builds on a generation of scholarship on Hindutva as ideology and praxis, yet his in-depth ethnographic approach includes surprises and twists. Ethnography as a method requires not merely cultural immersion but empathy for one’s research subjects. Longkumer defies the tendency of ethnographers to study the subaltern and marginalized to tell empathetic tales of agency and resistance. He urges us to take seriously the words and deeds of Hindutva activists, whom we may dismiss otherwise as unworthy of empathy. They are primarily men, young or old, driven by a passion for a distinctive ideological vision of Indian nationhood as an indivisible unity, albeit varying across social axes and ethno-regions. These male activists conjoin territorial irredentism in a landlocked frontier with a creative politics of persuading Northeasterners that their tribal customs and myths are, in fact, rooted in the broader ethos of an Indic civilization. Indigeneity is understood here not merely as a peculiar property of some groups, but as a characteristic feature of India as an essentially Hindu nation. This passionate politics of persuasion subsumes multiple ontologies and traditions within a greater whole, namely, Akhand Bharat. What we may discern here is the making of a new political religion that goes beyond the secular-instrumental rationality of colonial and postcolonial statemaking in India and elsewhere. A small, committed band of true believers live and work in inhospitable conditions to serve them (sewa) and to tell them that it is precisely their Indigenous authenticity that renders them an ideal laity of Hindu-Indians.
If the first three chapters of The Greater India Experiment tease out Hindutva’s patient and passionate politics of persuasion, the next three dwell on the everyday negotiations between activists and their target populations. In Christian-majority Nagaland, for example, a longstanding secessionist war has shaped politics and society since the end of British colonial rule. Unsuccessful attempts to carve out an independent Naga state have coexisted uneasily alongside parleys with New Delhi to demand greater autonomy in political and cultural affairs. Longkumer shows how the prophetic imagination of evangelical Christianity is critical to understanding why Naga leaders court the Indian state even as they dream of a state of their own. Negotiations with New Delhi follow detailed instructions in prophetic dreams, which insurgent leaders interpret to engage with Hindu nationalists in power much as they did with previous governments featuring the Congress Party. Prophecy affords a hopeful way to seek one’s own sovereignty under God without necessarily committing to endless bloodshed or total war. Such cosmological beliefs, Longkumer argues, are regarded by Hindutva activists as mere beliefs that do not threaten their cherished notions of an all-India political Hinduism. While Christianity remains a foreign force in their worldview, Hindutva activists aim to domesticate it as a body of peculiar beliefs that do not conflict with territorially-defined Indian nationhood. At the same time, the foreignness of Christianity can be attacked in terms of the influence of overseas missions and money, and tribal icons such as Rani Gaidinliu can be revived as non- or anti-Christian icons.
None of the above, Longkumer argues, suggests an easy ride for Hindutva in India’s Northeast. Its activists, often challenged to break caste taboos, are accustomed to failure and struggle. Electoral alliances and compromises make up for an inability to win outright in democratic contests. The Christianities of Northeast India remain dominant, if not hegemonic, in the wider region. Self-professed Hindus are tiny religious minorities in Nagaland, Mizoram, and Meghalaya, and to a lesser extent in Manipur and Arunachal Pradesh. Nonetheless, it is precisely in this hostile, uneven terrain of political activism that Hindutva’s Greater India experiment unfolds. Away from the Islamophobic politics of the Indian mainland, a very different kind of politics appears to be at work here.
Longkumer must be commended for writing a pioneering book on the protean forms of Hindutva today. His most striking contribution might be to remind us that even the most unsavoury forms of political imaginaries can become palatable over time through careful and creative forms of persuasion. Non-believers can be transformed into a new laity for a cult of the nation without necessarily giving up on their ingrained ways of life. This is, arguably, where the appeal of not only Hindutva lies, but also of populist movements worldwide in an era of backlash against neoliberal globalization. I suggest that we see these movements beyond the timeworn categories of left and right as incipient political religions in which a committed core of believers bring successive waves of diverse non-believers into the fold. We may, in sum, need to leave behind our secular-rational modes of understanding democratic politics today in order to venture into unfamiliar, uncertain ground beyond the comforts of psephological hocus-pocus and online echo chambers.
Uday Chandra
Georgetown University in Qatar, Doha