While many commentators have noted the Bharatiya Janata Party’s more recent attempts at appropriating Gandhian imagery and symbolism, few have diverted their attention towards earlier attempts by Hindu Nationalists to do so. M. S. Golwalkar is the most prominent example of Hindu Nationalists who attempted to incorporate Gandhi into the pantheon of Hindutva (Hindu-ness). This article argues that Golwalkar reproduced Gandhian ideas as part of Hindu Nationalist thought, alongside carefully and consciously portraying himself as an ascetic politician, much like Gandhi, in the post-colonial leg of his career. He crafted a mode of Hindutva politics whereby his image as an extraordinarily able-bodied yogi became an archetype that was touted as a model for every swayamsevak to follow. Furthermore, the ideological shifts that are visible in Golwalkar’s later publications created greater room in Hindutva thought to incorporate Gandhi’s ideas and legacy into the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh’s (RSS) ideological fold. Doing so allowed Golwalkar to tackle the challenges the RSS faced after Gandhi’s assassination. This article locates Golwalkar and the RSS in the shadow of the Mahatma to not only broaden the understanding of Gandhi’s legacy in post-colonial India but also to prompt a reappraisal of the nature of Hindutva itself. By exploring the Sangh’s deep appropriation of Gandhi’s ideas and legacy, one can begin to understand the malleable and flexible nature of the otherwise narrow majoritarian Hindu Nationalist project.

The lack of electoral success of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in the South Indian state of Kerala is often explained through the idea of Kerala ‘exceptionalism’, a broad term used to explain the unique historical, political, and developmental trajectory of the state. However, such explanations do not adequately address the systematic and concerted attempts by Hindu nationalist organizations to transform the cultural sphere of Kerala into a fertile ground for its future electoral politics. Through an ethnographic study of three Hindu nationalist organizations in the civil society sphere of Kodungallur, a multi-religious town in central Kerala, this article explores the politics and implications of their cultural interventions. The article argues that, peeved by an ‘absent Hindu atmosphere’ in Kerala, these organizations are trying to construct new forms of sociality and subjectivity and a grassroots public sphere embedded in Hindu nationalist ideology in Kodungallur. Often described by these organizations as ‘apolitical’ and ‘cultural’, these interventions are indeed a critique of the Kerala public sphere which is characterized by religious pluralism and secular sociality. Hence, the attempt to create a ‘Hindu atmosphere’ by these organizations is a deeply political endeavour aimed at creating an exclusivist Hindu hegemony in the cultural sphere, which they assume will pave the way for their electoral hegemony in Kerala in the long run.

Using evidence regarding the consolidation of Hindu nationalism in India we put forward new ethnographic data about the variety of popular support for a Hindutva project and a new framework that proposes an interactive theory of social identity. This framework helps us understand how Hindu nationalism becomes embedded in society. We assert that Hindu nationalism in India could be fruitfully analysed by focusing on the processes through which ideas of exclusive nationalism spread among ordinary middle-class people and are expressed in micro-level psychological changes at the individual level. The consolidation of Hindu nationalism in India is being authored not only by parties or the state, but also by societal actors, specifically, ordinary middle-class Indians. Hindu nationalism has been spreading in micro-public spheres in a time of apparent peace and between elections, and with the participation of willing supporters. Building on our fieldwork and research in psychology and history, our conversations have also helped us to identify profiles of different types of nationalists, which we categorize as willing ethnic-nationalists, hardliners, bystanders, and moderates. Further, we suggest the need to focus on inter-linked micro-level mechanisms such as diffusion and emulation of Hindu-centric beliefs and ideas, mobilization by hardliners and organizations, and impunity resulting from protection by state agencies, which helps to create willing ethnic-nationalists and sustains Hindu nationalism. Evidence regarding social interactions from a variety of survey organizations concurs with our findings and our ethnographic material allows us to delve deeper into varieties of Hindu nationalist support across diverse ordinary people.

Lala Lajpat Rai is increasingly viewed in historiography as a “Hindu nationalist” with a strong affinity with Savarkarite Hindutva. This article demonstrates that during the Khilafat movement, Lajpat Rai articulated a secular Indian nationalism that was sensitive to Muslim religiosity and Indian Muslims’ extraterritorial sympathies toward the caliphate and the Muslim world. Pigeonholing the entire thought of Lajpat Rai as “Hindu nationalism” obscures a historical-intellectual juncture when a Hindu political figure like him enthusiastically supported pan-Islamism as necessary for Indian nationalism. This article complicates scholarship that portrays Hindu responses to the Khilafat movement as consisting solely of fear and counter-consolidation. More importantly, by unveiling Rai's Khilafat-era nationalism, it uncovers the intellectual and political possibility of firmly holding a Hindu identity and articulating conceptions of Indian nationhood that are at ease with Islam and the wider Muslim world.

This paper intervenes in critical socio-legal/post-colonial scholarship on human rights directed at how religion is constitutive of race and shapes who and what is regarded as ‘human’ and entitled to rights. It focuses on the Indian post-colony and legal persecution of the Tablighi Jamaat, a global, quietest Islamic movement, by the Hindu Right government during the Covid pandemic. It analyses how religion structures race in Hindu nationalist discourse to transform the Muslim into a perpetual outsider and an existential and epistemic threat to the Hindu nation and rights of the Hindu racial majority. The discussion connects to the epistemic anxiety generated by the alternative worldviews presented by this racialised ‘Other’ that shape legal consciousness and rights interventions globally. In complicating how anti-Muslim racism and Islamophobia are integral to the transnational histories of race and race-making, the analysis triggers a rethinking of human rights interventions and the epistemological closures they enact.

In this article, I argue that religious nationalism poses a unique challenge to the liberal theory of religious freedom. In arguing this, the article first develops and defines an ideal type of religious nationalism through an analysis of Hindu-nationalist and religious Zionist thought. I show that religious nationalism in states like India and Israel have the unique status of intimate rivals. They are intimate since they are able to successfully present themselves as the carriers of the authentic character of the nation-state and utilize modern political tools. As a result, they are free of much of the unifying pressures of state nationalism. And they are rivals because they promote a vision of society and politics that fundamentally challenges the political identity of the state. The paper then turns to the justifications and rationales of religious freedom—both in seminal cases and in political and legal scholarship—and applies them to religious nationalism. It argues that the status of intimate rivalry should, depending on which justification of religious freedom we adhere to, change the way in which we morally and legally understand religious nationalism. First, because religious nationalism is intimate—that is, acceptable and mainstream—it should be approached as a part of the culture of the majority. This implies that we should be less concerned about infringements of religious freedom in the case of the adherents and organizations of religious nationalism. Second, the rivalry of religious nationalism is in itself a good reason for the nation-state not to accommodate it.

Anthropological studies of Indian villages conducted in the 1950s and 1960s form a valuable archive of rural life soon after India's independence. We compare sections of that archive with recent fieldwork in the same villages in Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, and Odisha. If we trust the ethnography of the 1950s, domestic and caste spheres were the locations of village incivility. It is noteworthy that there is no reference in the early work to the Partition of the subcontinent that had occurred just a few years before. Neither is there mention of discrimination or violence carried out in the name of religion in these locations. New fieldwork reveals a different story about the rise of wholesale religious incivility in the public sphere. Caste has not vanished, but inter-caste relations have taken on new forms. We suggest that the intersection of affirmative action policies, political parties, and the systematic penetration of Hindu nationalist organizations has been crucial in the remaking of rural India.