The frontiers of Calcutta witnessed a demographic revolution in every direction in the 1950s and 1960s. The city's economic deceleration, which had set in after the First World War, became more acute after 1947. Amidst an irreversible economic decay—through the 1950s and 1960s—refugees from East Pakistan and economic migrants from West Bengal's rural districts came to populate not only inner-city bustees and squatter colonies in the city, but also places beyond the city's civic limits. A report published in the Economic Weekly in 1954, for instance, noted how vacant stretches of land outside the city, between Dum Dum and Barasat, came to be populated by refugee squatter groups in the early 1950s:

Besides claiming land by invoking the Lockean logic of individual labour and self-improvement, these squatters and bustee dwellers—refugees and rural– urban migrants alike—contributed to the creation of an enormous and diverse fringe economy in Calcutta, which, by the 1970s, had come to be known as the ‘informal sector’ at the instance of the International Labour Organization (ILO). Every morning, people commuted to the city from these new suburbs and jabardakhal settlements to eke out a living and returned home in the evening, in suburban trains and buses. Commuting became a mass phenomenon. Along with it came informally settled marketplaces in train compartments, rail stations, tram depots, and bus terminuses.

A section of the urban poor, especially those who migrated from West Bengal's rural districts, made the sidewalks their ‘home’ and stayed there for years and decades.

Introduction

The majority of modern activities and transactions are concentrated in the capital cities of developing countries: It is where the bulk of the formal sector employment is generated. This is also where one would encounter relatively more women in the labour market and, generally, a superior standard of living in terms of health and well-being, literacy, women's status, and social mobility, as well as access to public services. The capital is also where one would expect to find museums, art galleries, film industries, theatres, fashion houses, and other important cultural centres.

Many developing areas are undergoing rapid urbanization, and this has been particularly true for the city of Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, where rates of urbanization have been high. Such growth is not devoid of economic logic, as has been pointed out. Generally, high urbanization rates are a positive indication suggesting strong economic performance. Urbanization and city growth are caused by different factors, including rural–urban migration, natural population increase and horizontal expansion. However, the fundamental cause relates to patterns of economic expansion and structural transformation in the case of sustained urbanization as has been witnessed in Dhaka.

While urbanization is powering economic growth, it is also generating formidable challenges of management and sustainability. With forecasts that more than half of Bangladesh's population may be living in urban areas by 2040 from the current level of nearly 40 per cent, these challenges are set to become even more complex.

The story of urbanization in Bangladesh is mainly a story about Dhaka, its premier, indeed primate city and the centre of the administrative, political, cultural, and economic life of the country. There are other towns and cities as well, of which Chittagong in the southeast and Khulna in the southwest are the most important and serve as the country's maritime gateways to the world. Chittagong is much larger than Khulna and was given the name Porto Grande by the Portuguese and was once considered the most prosperous city in the ‘Kingdom of Bengala’ (Encyclopaedia Britannica 2021). This chapter, however, focuses mainly on Dhaka, which has become Asia's fastest-growing megacity in the 21st century, alone accounting for around 40 per cent of the national economic pie and more than a third of the nation's urban population (Afsar and Hossain 2020).

In this chapter, I draw upon a repository of moving images, recollections, photo fragments, notes, memories and stories from three sets of journeys that I made to Nagpur, Maharashtra, while filming the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (henceforth RSS or Sangh) in 1992 when the Bhartiya Janta Party (henceforth BJP) was in the opposition; in 2000 and 2001 when the RSS–BJP came to power under the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) coalition government of Atal Bihari Vajpayee; and finally a third filming trip in 2016 when the RSS–BJP had become the force behind the state under the Narendra Modi regime. These trips have resulted in two films on the RSS – The Boy in the Branch (1993) and The Men in the Tree (2002) – and in contemporary research and ongoing visual documentation about different facets of the Sangh Parivar.

This chapter explores the role of the RSS shakha (branch) in reproducing and consolidating Hindu nationalist ideology. I argue for an extensive approach to the shakha that pays attention to both the daily structured activities that take place within the branch and the social connections that are forged by networks, spaces and milieus outside the shakha environment. I suggest that the key to the shakha's effectiveness lie in these linkages that are able to extend the ideology and the form of the shakha from the playground, the home and the family to the world at large.

The argument is developed in three sections. In the first section of the chapter ‘The Shakha Within’, I explore how the RSS shakha structures and reproduces social relations within Maharashtrian, Brahmin-dominated neighbourhoods in Nagpur. I show how the shakha indoctrinates Hindu boys and young men to the worldview of the RSS through an ingenious system involving play and storytelling, somatic ritual, discipline and bodily comportment and leisure-time socialization that extends beyond the ambit of the daily shakha meetings. I show how the shakha games and stories are adapted according to the age of the volunteer, and how these gradually become more ideological and physical over time with the eventual aim of creating loyal, action-oriented and militant bodies in the service of the RSS.

Introduction

Religious ideas have played – and as this chapter will show, continue to play – a central role in Indian politics, and these ideas are gendered in nature. Some of these take a particular masculine form – violent, heterosexual and upper caste – and it finds expression in the political sphere through physical as well as symbolic forms of violence. One such form of masculinity gaining political capital is ascetic masculinity. I demonstrate in this chapter that the manifestation of ascetic masculinity traced in the works of Vivekananda, Golwalkar and Gandhi continue to be present and influence politics in India. A politics of appropriation in the contemporary Indian politics has seen right-wing Hindutva organizations applauding Gandhi and Vivekananda often. There is a growing trend within the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to celebrate both Gandhi and his assassin, Nathuram Godse (Mukherjee 2019). This chapter will look at how ascetic aspects of the works of Vivekananda and Gandhi are taken out of context and appropriated by the RSS–BJP that helps them correlate their ideas of asceticism with that of Golwalkar, and how that appropriation is serving their violent masculinist tendencies.

The practices of violent masculinism in Indian politics in the early twentieth century bear resemblance to the political masculinity in contemporary India. This violent masculinism derives its strength from other structural hierarchies such as casteism. The need of the hour is to understand gender relations in their totality – the whole spectrum of manhood, womanhood, sexes, sexualities and their interconnections with our social spheres of culture, politics and religion. In fact, in either responding to a sociopolitical moment or attempting to re-enact a particular sociopolitical situation, the formation of hegemonic masculinity can be of use to bring back historical memories and past imaginings into present use. As Anand (2009) observes:

In the performance of Hindu masculinity, the spheres of politics and religion continually intersect. The self-identity manifested by the state is that of a father figure – heterosexual, Hindu and patriarchal. This chapter will interrogate this Hindu masculine identity and how violent ascetic masculinity plays a role in its creation based on Islamophobia since the nineteenth century.

On 5 August 2019, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government, headed by Narendra Modi, unilaterally abrogated Articles 370 and 35A of the Indian Constitution to repeal Kashmir's semi-autonomous status in India and undermine its United Nation (UN)–mandated right to self-determination through a free and impartial plebiscite. Of course, Kashmir's semi-autonomous status was in place against the backdrop of an Indian occupation that has made it the most militarized place in the world. Many Indians considered Articles 370 and 35A to be an obstruction to Kashmir's integration into India and celebrated the BJP government's decision as a bold step to correct a seven-decade-long ‘historic blunder’ that, they claimed, had impeded Kashmir's growth and development and ‘promoted separatist’ sentiments in the Valley (BBC News 2019). India's violent annexation of Kashmir was framed as a benevolent step to ‘usher in a new dawn’ in the region through Indian investments – at par with other states in India – and build a more peaceful and prosperous region (Economic Times 2019; Shringla 2019). A few months after the abrogation, while the residents were silenced by an unprecedented media and communication blackout and forced to remain caged inside their homes through curfews and shutdowns, Indian investors met in various cities of the country to carve out new investment opportunities in the region in mining, pilgrimage tourism, real estate, housing, and hydropower. In a PowerPoint slide from an investment summit held in Bangalore a few weeks after the abrogation, Article 370 was drawn as a concertina wire, which symbolized its oppressive grip over Kashmir, and represented India's historic failure to integrate the region, which according to government officials, had ‘lagged’ behind every other state in India (Parker 2019). Vast numbers of Indians celebrated Modi as the vikas purush (development man), convinced that Article 370 had stymied development in Kashmir and held it hostage for seven decades.

Despite the fact that Kashmir has routinely performed better compared to other Indian states on many socio-economic indicators such as education, poverty, life expectancy rates, and wealth distribution patterns, thanks in large part to land reforms of the 1950s, the myth of its underdevelopment has persisted in the Indian consciousness for decades (Vishwadeepak 2019).

In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera discusses the problem of ‘eternal return’: he writes that in life everything would be cynically permitted if it were seen as happening only once, never recurring, and disappearing into a vacuum after occurrence. History is sometimes viewed as an account of events and things long past, a recital that may be interesting, dramatic, and tragic, but with little consequence in the long run. However, the discourse on institutional development is one that rakes the graveyard of history and raises a spectre haunting current day attempts at economic development. ‘Institutions’ are seen as almighty and eternal, and the post-colonial state as a corrosive inheritance of imperial rule that negatively affects progress by structuring the rules of the game and making any real welfare gains impossible. Simultaneously, the field of development studies has emerged as one that is ahistorical and forward-looking, constantly in search of innovative cures to lead poor countries to prosperity. This book is an attempt to historicize both the discourse on colonial institutions and prescriptions in development studies through an examination of economic reform in colonial Punjab.

The central argument of this study emerges from a dialectical engagement with the economic history of the Punjab on the one hand and theories and practices of development studies on the other. Existing scholarship on colonial Punjab views it either as a leading beneficiary of empire and the site for some of its greatest achievements, or as a victim of planned social and economic engineering that has perpetuated extractive institutions and poverty for successive generations in the region. This book argues that both these accounts of the colonial impact in the Punjab are preoccupied with macroeconomic and large-scale changes, such as the establishment of canal colonies, and ignore a history of microeconomic reform in the province that does not admit as reductive an assessment of empire as the two dominant and conflicting accounts.

In this book, I have tried to demystify the ideology of motion in the twentieth century's capitalist urban context by narrating the making of Calcutta through its streets. Drawing on specific instances from Calcutta's twentieth-century archives, the book reveals that the street is not a mere engineering object outside the realms of ideology and politics (in fact, no engineering object is ever outside the realms of ideology and politics). In our story, the street is not just a metaphor or a vehicle for politics. Neither is the street merely the setting for politics, existing outside of and separate from it. Here the street itself is the product of politics and politics, in turn, a product of the street. In fact, I have argued that the street is politics inasmuch as politics is the production of space—whether by states or their subjects, whether in pursuit of capitalist accumulation or not. I historicized and theorized the street as a framing device of my story and an apparatus of city-making—a master infrastructure. In this journey, we met some remarkable urban craftsmen—agitators, rioters, commoners, raiders, hawkers, cops, and engineers—and wrote a local history of Calcutta from their perspectives. I read their diverse crafts of city-making through the ‘dialectical twining’ of capital's spatial mobilization and the everyday struggles of city dwellers—structure and agency.

Together, these five chapters tell us a story. At once mundane and monumental, the streets are matters that move matters and thus enable motion's distribution in space. The violence of planned street and infrastructure building valorized urban land as it became the prime outlet of capital in the interwar years. Ultimately it produced an indistinction between rent and interest, with interest rate becoming crucial for both the Calcutta Improvement Trust and developers. In short, rent became the prime count of wealth and a new image of profit as surplus profit transformed into ground rent.

This process unfolded in the separation of the urban poor from their sites of production and social reproduction as ‘congested’ neighbourhoods and bustees in the inner city made way for viable neighbourhoods as ‘land’ in the market

In November 2019, the above epigraph from Hinnells and Sharpe (1972) was proved right in Karnataka, as the state witnessed another case of caste-related killings when a couple was hacked to death for intercaste marriage. The man belonged to Madar caste and the woman to Lamani caste. While both are listed as Scheduled Castes, or SCs (ex-untouchables) in Karnataka, Lamanis consider themselves to be higher than Madars, and it was the Lamanis who were accused of murdering the couple. Violence among SCs is, however, rare in India. Caste may construct what Frederick Bailey calls ‘civility of indifference’ in rural India (Bailey 1996), and instances of full-scale intercaste wars are indeed rare. However, transgressions that violate ritual and hierarchical order result in intercaste violence, and ex-untouchable castes are mostly at the receiving end.

In this chapter, I engage with the question of new Hindutva by revisiting an old conflicting distinction set up by Ashis Nandy between Hindutva and Hinduism (Nandy 1991). While Nandy hoped for an end of Hindutva at the hands of Hinduism, the former has not only survived but grown leaps and bounds. A foundational problem with those who place faith in Hinduism for fighting Hindutva is their overlooking of the caste question. I approach new Hindutva by locating caste at the centre of popular Hinduism and thereby distinguishing it from Hindutva. Hindutva has historically pursued a nationalist critique of caste and thus has been part of the Hindu-modernizing/reform process (Bayly 1988). I engage with the contemporary forms of engagement with caste in Hindutva's ideology-building to unravel the making of Hinduism as a civil religion.

Caste, though weakening, continues to substantially define the selfhood of most Hindus in rural and urban India (Waghmore 2018, 2019). Anti-caste discourse is all-pervasive in movements that mobilize around Phule–Ambedkarite ideology and the imagined bahujan collective identity (Waghmore 2013). Left movements are also now setting foot into anti-caste politics. Hindu nationalists engage with the problem of caste by resorting to a discourse and politics of Hindu unity and humanism across castes.

If ghettos were the sites of surveillance and control—as we have seen in Chapter 3— frontiers represented lawlessness and chaos that needed to be counteracted to transform them into suburbs. Suburbanization in the context of early-twentieth-century Calcutta was a conscious planning response to the problems of inner-city ‘congestion’, public health breakdown, and industrialization. Some of the suburbs—such as Alipore and Cossipore—were already developed in the nineteenth century as highly gentrified spaces dotted with upper-class garden houses. But most of the frontiers of the city to the south and east that were developed through the twentieth century were still forested, low lying, and marshy, and punctuated by natural bodies or water at the turn of the century. These spaces could not be brought to planned urbanization without remaking them as worthy of building activities. Forests needed to be cleared, ponds were to be drained out, dried, and filled, and lowlands needed to be raised with additional soil. Taming the frontiers thus required a considerable logistical mobilization.

This collection of essays examines the phenomenon of contemporary Hindu nationalism or ‘New Hindutva’ in India, the ideology that orients the popularly elected national government of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP, Indian People's Party) that has been in power since 2014. There is a rich body of academic work on Hindu nationalism, but its main focus is on the insurgent mass mobilizations that roiled the country in the 1980s and 1990s. In contrast to this era of mandir (temple) politics, new Hindutva is a governmental formation with considerable institutional heft that converges with wider global currents and enjoys an unprecedented level of mainstream acceptance.

Contemporary Hindu nationalist politics is also significantly different from earlier versions in both form and substance. For instance, economic and foreign policy projects and aspirations are as important to Hindu nationalists today as are their efforts to shape and transform cultural and religious identity along Hindu majoritarian lines. Expanding beyond the regional arena of north Indian Hindi heartland politics, regions in the south, east, and northeast of the country have emerged as central theatres of Hindutva political action. The politics of caste has assumed a new and intense significance for Hindu nationalist mobilization and electioneering. Finally, cellular and individualized forms of vigilante action have emerged alongside older cadre-based, centralized, and mass organizational forms to advance the violent politics of Hindutva in the twenty-first century.

To understand these new political forms and their implications for democratic futures, a fresh set of reflections is in order. The essays in this volume address contemporary Hindutva as an example of a democratic authoritarianism or an authoritarian populism, that is, a politics that simultaneously advances and violates ideas and practices of popular and constitutional democracy. The democratic context of Hindutva as an electorally acclaimed and now apparently mainstream political project is our key concern. What are the causes and consequences of the rise of Hindutva, and of avowedly non-democratic Hindu nationalist organizations like the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS, National Volunteer Organization), in an intensely competitive electoral democracy?

Understanding Hindu Nationalism

The 1990s saw a surge of scholarly interest in the rise of Hindu nationalism. Reflecting the socio-political and academic zeitgeist, these interventions shared several common features.