This chapter contains historical support for my argument from the pre-modern and modern worlds. Even though industrialization was very limited in the pre-modern world, I provide evidence that urban, industrial areas allowed for the creation of broader ethno-national identities in the two cases of ancient Greece and Rome. I then discuss theories of the rise of nationalism in the modern world, with close examination of several cases from both Western and Eastern Europe. In particular I examine in more detail how industrialization encouraged assimilation in Germany and the constituent nations of the United Kingdom, before moving on to a discussion of the case of South Africa. In many of these cases I not only show how industrialization led to the growth of broader ethnic identities but how these processes were actively discouraged by the state, most obviously in the case of apartheid South Africa, while in other cases state-promoted assimilation failed.

Here I examine in more detail my first case study, namely mid-twentieth-century Turkey. The presence of high-quality census data from Turkey between 1935 and 1965 allows me to replicate my statistical analysis from the previous chapter at the provincial level to show that urbanization is correlated with increasing levels of people identifying as Turkish; moreover, this relationship is robust to the inclusion of a number of different controls and the use of sub-samples. Qualitative examination of evidence from Turkey suggests that this process was a consequence of economic structural change and incentives provided by the state, such that incentivized assimilation took place in urban Turkey but not in the countryside. Indeed, I show that a lack of industrialization in Kurdistan was responsible for the lack of Turkish identification in the region, despite both violent and non-violent attempts by the Turkish state at assimilating its Kurdish population.

Here I provide an overview of the concepts of ethnicity and industrialization. I first define ethnic groups as descent-based groups and show how vertical ethnic change can take place, both through the consolidation of smaller ethnic groups into larger ones as well as assimilation into a national identity. The chapter also discusses why the book focusses on what I call vertical ethnic change instead of horizontal ethnic change, namely because the former is far more prevalent than the latter. I then provide a similar overview of the concept of industrialization, by focussing on how industrialization has historically involved a shift in the focus of the economy from rural agriculture to urban employment and from land to labour as the predominant factor of production. I justify my use of carbon emissions as my predominant cross-national quantitative measure of industrialization and my use of urbanization as my main proxy for industrialization for regions or communities within countries.

Introduction

In November 2018, the Kinnar Akhada, a religious order established by members of the kinnar and hijra communities, declared that they supported the demand for the construction of a Ram temple on the site of the destroyed Babri Masjid in Ayodhya. At a meeting organized by the Akhil Bharatiya Sant Samiti, an umbrella body of Hindu monks and ascetics, to which the Kinnar Akhada had been invited, Acharya Mahamandleshwar Laxmi Narayan Tripathi declared, ‘whether anybody is gay, lesbian, transgender, whatever is anybody [sic] sexuality … the biggest thing is the Hindu sanatan dharma [duty]. And the sanatan vedic practice has never questioned anyone's sexuality. Our religion has space for everyone … it takes every one along’ (Verma 2018).

Is there a place in the nation for ‘queer’ communities? LGBT+ groups have gained significant rights in the last decade, with two Supreme Court judgment declaring equal rights and protections for transgender communities and decriminalizing same-sex sexual practices. The right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (hereafter BJP) has drafted and passed Parliament bills, enshrining in law protections of transgender rights. The Indian state has acted as the paternalistic giver of rights. But it does not consider all LGBT+ citizens equal: transgender communities appear to benefit over LGB ones, trans women over trans men, Hindu trans communities over Muslim ones.

How – and why – might the Hindu right foreground some forms of transgender identity at the expense of others? Considering the Supreme Court judgment on transgender rights, National Legal Services Authority (NALSA) v. Union of India and Others (2014), and Parliament bills subsequent to this judgment, this chapter considers how and why the Hindu right favours Hindu trans (feminine) identities above other less visible, non-homonormative trans identities and Muslim trans people. Although the NALSA judgment was delivered in April 2014, preceding the BJP election in May of the same year, the incoming government was mandated to adopt the judgment's recommendations. The Indian state has treated trans rights as something to be undertaken in a procedural manner rather than an ethical one, with certain trans communities benefitting from unequal representation (notably Hindu, trans feminine identities), demonstrating a lack of care with which the government has attended to this task.

Building on the legal architecture of reform, colonial officers championed a wide-ranging grassroots response to indebtedness. This centred around the establishment of credit cooperatives of various kinds, whose main purpose was to ‘reform’ the peasant and relieve him from the shackles of debt. The initiative tapped into many of the urges of the colonial state, including the shifting of emphasis from colonial policies as a potential cause of indebtedness (such as the onerous revenue demand), and also utilized the youthful aspirations of ‘missionary’ officers who found a painstaking purpose in reforming the habits of indolent and habitually indebted peasants. Credit cooperatives remained varied in form and definition throughout the Punjab, and this chapter unveils the different manifestations and articulations of the idea. Overall, the cooperative movement became the major policy response on the ground to indebtedness. It evaluates how the provision of credit from cooperatives had limited success and uses this ‘policy intervention’ to understand institutional failure and the nature and scope of development policy in the Punjab. It also draws close parallels with more contemporary solutions to underdevelopment, including community development programmes and the popularization of microfinance.

The Cooperative Movement in the Punjab

Large-scale peasant indebtedness was not unique to the Punjab, and the worst peasant riots and disturbances in this regard were arguably seen in the south of India in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Cooperation as a tool of economic reform was also first used in the south. In 1892, the Government of Madras appointed a senior officer, Sir Frederick Nicholson, to study agricultural banks in Europe and the possibilities of adapting them in India. Nicholson's report recommended the establishment of cooperative credit societies in India similar to German Raiffeisen societies. His report was circulated among other Indian states and in the United Provinces. H. Dupernex also wrote a book, Peoples’ Banks for Northern India, during the same period.

Automobility began to emerge as a significant aspect of urban mobility in the west as well as in prime colonial cities such as Calcutta and Bombay in the last decade of the nineteenth century. Automobiles became ubiquitous and dominant in many of these cities by the 1940s. In South Asian cities such as Calcutta, automobiles had to share space and time with other, more primordial and slower, means of human locomotion throughout the twentieth century (and even the twenty-first), producing differential mobilities on city roads. Their emergence necessitated and culminated in several significant urban spatial reforms, which began—as we have seen—as a counterinsurgency and public health measure in the mid-nineteenth century. Automobility gave these reforms a new orientation by which—as Richard Sennett mentions in the opening quote—public space turned out to be ‘a derivative from motion’.

The streets that literally undergirded and made possible the modern automobile age came into existence in prime cities all over the world in the first half of the twentieth century. A set of new paving experiments facilitated and coincided with a host of other innovations, such as sidewalks, public squares, parks, and elevated tramways on green boulevards. These spaces materialized in the triadic encounters of engineers, commoners, and agitators. In giving shape to streets, both experts, who planned their construction, and users, who navigated their lives through them, ended up shaping each other in myriad ways.

The link between the formalization of property rights and access to credit has been the subject of serious academic inquiry in recent decades. Perhaps most notably, the Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto has analysed the relationship between the two in post-colonial and fragile contexts. However, the debate has a much longer history of informing policy, especially in colonial contexts where the desire to increase revenue collection by the colonial power hinged on the prior registration of property. The fact that this formalization of property rights also enabled experiments involving access to credit in the Punjab is a later development, and one that echoes in scholarship such as de Soto's till today.

In the Punjab, the architecture for combating indebtedness had two major parts: legal changes and reform initiatives. This chapter interrogates the legal and institutional changes starting with the Punjab Alienation of Land Act of 1900. It then discusses the various pieces of legislation pushed by the Punjab Unionist Party, especially in the period 1937–46 which came to be known as the period of ‘golden laws’. By critically evaluating the preoccupation with indebtedness, it shows how the issue was a convenient one to focus on. It begins by discussing some of the theoretical literature on institutions to allow a full appreciation of the impact of these legal changes.

Institutions and Economic Development

In his seminal work on institutions and institutional change, the economic historian Douglass North defined institutions as humanly devised constraints that structure political, economic, and social interactions, and are a primary determinant of the economic performance of a state. The extensive social and economic engineering in the Punjab meant that the administrative or institutional structure in the province was in large part constructed by the British. It is therefore possible to question some theories of institutional development that posit that colonial institutions are responsible for long-run underdevelopment, by examining the history of the Punjab. In particular, the ideas of institutional theorists who believe that secure property rights and cheap credit must be the foundations of a sustained strategy of economic reform can be tested.

In early 2019, a short video clip of Pooja Shakun Pandey, a senior woman functionary of the Akhil Bharat Hindu Mahasabha (All India Hindu Grand-Assembly, henceforth ABHM), shooting an effigy of Mahatma Gandhi went viral (First Post 2019). The clip flaunted the violent militancy of a party woman. The recreation of the assassination, conducted at a local party office in Aligarh, was widely reported in national dailies (Barman 2019). Controversially, overt celebrations of Gandhi's murder have become commonplace in the last few years, and the ABHM, as is well known, was actually implicated in the murder conspiracy. Pushed into insignificance since the 1950s, the ABHM has, however, dramatically resurfaced in the last decade or so alongside the political ascendancy and electoral success of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). It is expanding its state-level chapters as well as front organizations among students, youth, ascetics and women. Strikingly, all its office-bearers at the central organizational level and in the working committee are upper-caste men.

The ‘public’ presence of militant women like Pooja Shakun Pandey intrigues academics about the appeal of right-wing political movements and parties for women: a significant question because these forces are otherwise markedly conservative about gender. What is the political trajectory of women in such parties? Why do we know so little about the foremothers, as it were, of women like Pandey? Though some work has been done on women of the Sangh Parivar, the lineages of Pandey in the Mahasabha are far less familiar. Feminist scholar Andrea Peto, who has researched the lives of fascist women in countries of the former Soviet Bloc, argues that one of the main challenges for scholars working on the biographies of such women is that of reconceptualizing a key theme in feminist research: gender and power (Peto 2009). Women can actually manipulate their subordinate positions to become political agents (ibid.). Scholars of fascism recognize that women craft their own agendas and gain some leverage within fascist movements and regimes, although male fascists may continue to consider their work as secondary (Passmore 2002: 130). A recognition of women as accomplices and active participants in right-wing movements leads one to think hard about their politicization and nature of participation in these movements. Indeed, prospographical research can help map ‘ordinary’ women participants and develop a more individualized picture (Peto 2009).

Introduction

The Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP), a Hindu religio-nationalist organization, came into existence in 1964 with the ostensible goals of rekindling ‘Hinduness’ as well as Hindu nationalism – particularly among the Hindu diaspora and among tribal communities in remote parts of India. It is a wing of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) led Sangh Parivar that works to disseminate the beliefs of Hindu nationhood in India and abroad. As part of this goal, the VHP has worked hard to pressurize the different central governments in India to construct a Ram temple at the erstwhile Babri Mosque site in Ayodhya – which, claims the Sangh Parivar, was the birthplace of the Hindu deity Ram. It is thus central to the identity of Hindus as a religious community. The VHP has also run campaigns for ghar wapsi, ‘love jihad’ and ‘cow protection’. Its women members, who are part of the main VHP organization and its offshoots, the Durga Vahini (Army of Durga) and the Mahila Vibhag (Women's Wing), play an important role in the project of Hindutva-ization. They have contributed not only in building the local visibility and media presence of the VHP but also in defining and fixing meanings of social values, morality and sexuality for a large segment of Hindus.

The aim of this chapter is to highlight how the women of the VHP carry forward the Sangh agenda, at a time when the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP, also a part of the Sangh Parivar) strove to become – and, eventually, did become – the ruling party in India. The chapter is divided into two sections. The first section discusses the launch of two women's organizations by the VHP and their main aims. It also discusses how they function within the larger mould of Hindutva. The second section looks at their activities in contemporary times, from around 2010. It focuses on how the organizations have moved from a national Ram Janmabhoomi-centric activism to a more locally oriented street and service activism. This section also elaborates the meanings of family, sanskaras and sexuality that are disseminated by these women's wings and have fed into the larger discourse of Hindu nationhood.