The Rhetoric of Hindu India
Language and Urban Nationalism

This book examines the late twentieth-century rise of the urban, right-wing Hindu nationalist ideology known as metropolitan Hindutva.

Manisha Basu (Author)

9781107149878, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 2 November 2016

227 pages
23.7 x 16 x 2 cm, 0.47 kg

'The Rhetoric of Hindu India is a timely and productive addition to South Asian studies, and its theoretical and methodological frameworks have an applicability beyond the Indian context. The book engenders further conversations about the public(s) that the rhetoric of metropolitan Hindutva gives rise to, the consideration of what makes India 'Hindu' and whether literatures in vernacular languages mimic the movements that Basu has masterfully traced within Anglophone literature.' Nabeel Jafri, International Journal of Hindu Studies

This book examines the late twentieth-century rise of the urban, right-wing Hindu nationalist ideology known as metropolitan Hindutva. This ideology, the book assesses, aspires to be a pan-Indian, urban form that is home to the emerging, digitally enabled, technocratic middle classes of the nation. Through close analyses of the writings of a range of self-styled public intellectuals, from Arun Shourie and Swapan Dasgupta to Chetan Bhagat and Amish Tripathi, this book maps this new avatar of Hindutva. Finally, in analyzing the language of metropolitan Hindutva, it arrives at an emerging idea of India as part of what Amitav Ghosh has called a contemporary Anglophone empire. This is the first extended scholarly effort to theorize a politics of language in relation to the dangers of such an imperializing Hindutva.

Preface
1. Introductory matters: the strange case of secular India
2. Time's victims in a Second Republic: new histories, new temporalities
3. To make free and let die: the economics of metropolitan Hindutva
4. A power over life and rebirth: V. D. Savarkar and the essentials of Hindutva
5. Between death and redemption: Hindu India and its antique Others
6. The afterlife of Indian writing in English: telematic managers, journalistic mantras.

Subject Areas: Religious & theocratic ideologies [JPFR], Nationalism [JPFN]