Amid ethno-nationalism’s current worldwide rise, India and Israel have witnessed new manifestations of authoritarianism and state capture by far-right movements championing ethno-religious dominance and purity. Both have seen a sharp uptick in state and vigilante violence, suppression of press freedom, and scapegoating of political opponents and minorities. Narendra Modi and Benjamin Netanyahu have also been bolstered by support from European and American governments and from (respectively) Hindu and Jewish Americans. Crafting effective strategies of containment in such cases demands comparative analysis. In that spirit, this three-part series of Recall This Book conversations offers insight into Hindu and Israeli ethno-nationalisms as distinct but comparable phenomena.

The two subsequent pieces will focus on Israeli ethno-nationalism and on the parallels to be drawn between these two cases. Here, Ajantha and Lori talk with anthropologist Balmurli Natrajan about different aspects of the Hindu nationalist movement. The conversation explores its ideological pillars, caste as disruptive of the Hindutva project, the instrumentalization of religion, and divergent strategies used to incorporate or scapegoat Dalits, Muslims, the Left, and the US Hindu diaspora. The exchange is particularly relevant now in the immediate aftermath of India’s 2024 general election, which saw mixed results for the ruling Hindu nationalist BJP.

A longer version of this interview aired recently on Recall This Book, a podcast partnered with Public Books. You can listen to the interview here or by subscribing to Recall This Book on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

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Ajantha Subramanian (AS): Balmurli, your book, The Culturalization of Caste in India: Identity and Inequality in a Multicultural Age, is a rich ethnographic account of the Kumhar caste of potters in the central Indian state of Chhattisgarh. It offers an account of how the lives and livelihoods of the Kumhars have changed over time.

One of the things that you argue very strongly is that Kumhar elites, people who no longer practice this craft, have taken to framing caste identity in cultural terms. For you, this is problematic. Can you flesh out this argument for our listeners?

What’s the problem with seeing caste principally as a cultural identity?

 

Balmurli Natrajan (BN): I wrote this book in response to a liberal understanding of caste from an anticaste position, which I was encountering in popular, official, and some scholarly discourse on caste. Interestingly, and very dangerously, this understanding coincided with the right-wing understanding of caste, with the right wing also thinking of themselves as anticaste.

This convergence between liberal and right-wing anticaste positions is comparable to the convergence between liberals and conservatives in the US around the US as a postracial society.

I captured this dynamic by articulating tropes that are common about caste today. The first one is that caste has modernized, and it’s even democratized, because previously historically marginalized castes have come into Indian politics. According to this trope, we really need not worry much about caste today; it’s a thing of the past. This trope also has its economic equivalent in the literature, with an argument that says, well, for an underdeveloped economy like India, caste is actually good for the growth of capitalism. Caste allows you to save transactional costs when there is trust based on common caste.

This is an argument about caste society as a variant of an ethnic economy in which economic transactions are underwritten by social ties of kinship. The added dimension here is of caste as a form of complementarity in which labor and skill are distributed across caste groupings in ways that add up to a productive and efficient system.

I focused in The Culturalization of Caste in India on a third trope, which is that caste is now no longer the hierarchy. It has transformed from a vertical into a horizontal structure, and it’s merely a form of benign difference. I call this culturalization, which I’ll say a little bit more about.

I see two larger takeaways from these political, economic, and cultural tropes. One is that caste exists, but in a benign, normal way. It just exists in privatized spaces, and doesn’t shape inequality, or dictate the terms of monopolization of wealth. It’s just there.

The other bookend is caste as the brutal abnormal. The notion of the brutal abnormal points to the fact that there are some incredibly violent incidents of caste discrimination and victimization that erupt from time to time, but it’s only from time to time. The word often used is “atrocity”—which connotes an exceptional or extraordinary event. This focus on the brutal and the glaringly abnormal makes everyday caste-based violence seem acceptable because it’s routine and ordinary. Also, according to this trope, when a caste atrocity happens, it always happens in some backward part of India, not in “modern” regions.

I wanted to develop a left egalitarian response to all of this. But I ended up focusing just on trope number three, which depicts caste as culture. All of this helped me formulate the understanding that identities and inequalities are actually two sides of a single process within caste. We have to pose the question, How does caste persist and what is the durability of caste? This helps us understand how caste legitimizes itself.

Culturalization, then, is really caste repackaging itself as culture. Caste takes up the grammar of culture in order to present itself as benign horizontal difference / identity. Culturalization depoliticizes caste. I have even called it a counterrevolution of caste. It is the most recent form of the legitimation of caste.

 

Lori Allen (LA): I was wondering if we could segue to your article on racialization and ethnicization. There you’re addressing how Hindutva manufactures hegemony in its differential treatment of Muslims and Dalits. You say that Hindutva relies on a racialization of the Muslim as a racial other, and on an ethnicization of the Dalit as an internal other. But you point out how this boundary is really unstable, and you talk about cow protection as one way that we can see that.

Could you lay out that argument about racialization and ethnicization, and how you see that working?

 

BN: When we think about the Hindutva project, we have to understand that it is not something that is just a recent electoral-based, triumphalist project. It has been at least 100 years, if not more, in the making.

The three pillars of Hindutva ideology are Hindu, Hindi, and Hindustan. This is in their founding documents, ideologically reproduced, culturally embodied, and signified in just about everything that they do.

The term Hindu is actually a racial term. Hindutva taps into folk theories of racial stocks and things like that. Hindu nationalists learned very clearly from the experiences of the Fascists in Italy and the Nazis in Germany. They essentially transposed the Jewish problem in Europe to the Muslim problem in India. In this framing, Muslims are the racial other of Hindu.

In the project of Hindu Rashtra, or the Hindu nation, which is the ultimate aim for Hindutva, the Muslim can only exist as a secondary citizen or needs to be excised. Discipline, punishment and other oppressive technologies are unleashed on the Muslim because that is the only way in which Hindu Rashtra can come into being. Only Hindus own the national territory, which is really Hindustan. The final piece is Hindi as the ethnolinguistic hegemonic identity. So a racial identity, a linguistic, ethnic identity, and a territorial identity are fused as the core of Hindu nationalism.

The Dalits are a thorn for Hindutva in a different way. They challenge the idea of a unified Hindu community, and the Hindutva project through their very existence as the outcastes of the social order. Of course, many Dalits still continue to be counted as Hindus and many Dalits do share certain forms of Hindu religious practice. Many Dalits worship Murugan, for example, a god who is very popular in South India. But the main point here is that the only way for Dalits to remain in some way amenable to Hindu Rashtra, is for Hindutva to ethnicize them as a seamless part of a national Hindu community.

But Dalits are recalcitrant. So, from time to time, they will be deemed to be as antinational as Muslims, as antinational as the Left, the intellectuals and artists, the human rights advocates—all those who are the more permanent enemies of Hindutva. Anyone who’s for civil liberties, anyone who speaks in a voice of dissent. (These people can be and are being put into jail, charged with sedition, based on ideas and laws from the colonial era.)

So that is the tricky thing for Hindutva. They don’t know what to do with either Muslims or Dalits, although they know what they want to do with both of them. They want Muslims to leave and they want Dalits to shut up and put up.

 

AS: Hindutva uses religion to whip up popular sentiment. It’s obviously been very effective. Christophe Jaffrelot, who’s one of the main political scientists who has been for decades working on the Hindu right, even makes the argument that one of the ways women have been recruited to the Hindu right is via religion—that religious conservatism maybe paradoxically has been one of Hindutva’s real attractions for women.

I’d like you to say more about religion. Is this a movement that started out as being more racial and territorial, but religion has become more prominent as a pivot of difference and as a mobilization tactic? Where is religion in this?

 

BN: I would say that religion has always been part of Hindutva, even though its founders and founding ideologues didn’t really get into religion in the sense of faith and devotion.

The equation of Hindutva with Hinduism, the religion, is one of the most difficult and emotive issues for those of us who oppose Hindutva. As I have consistently argued, Hindutva’s project is to speak for Hinduism, the religion, and all adherents to Hinduism.

It would be a mistake to gift that away. We have to have some way to say you could be a Hindu without being Hindutva. Hinduism has many aspects to it that have really nothing to do with Hindutva. This should not be a hard task, given the incredible myriad of beliefs, rituals, that get packaged as Hinduism. We should remember that Hannah Arendt said that the space of religion was vacated by secular Jewish left intellectuals, leaving it to the Zionists.

 

LA: I’m really glad you brought up Arendt there, Murli, because as you were talking, I was thinking about the parallel struggle among some anti-Zionist Jewish people to reclaim a Judaism that is a spirituality—a way of life that’s full of ritual beauty, that is unhooked from the Zionist project. Zionism, as you know, has a lot of parallels with the Hindutva project.

 

AS: Given the heterogeneity of what comes under this umbrella of Hinduism, how has Hindutva been so successful at convincing people of this equation between the ethno-territorial conception and religiosity?

 

LA: And can you talk about where you see the effect of populism in relation to the elitism of Hindutva?

We need to push the argument that one cannot benefit from liberalism here while supporting some kind of deeply antiliberal project in India.

BN: I think Hindutva has been successful and it has also failed, or at least it has run up against its own limitations.

Jaffrelot—who is probably one of the best scholars of Hindutva that we have today—understands Hindutva as ethno-nationalism, which is supremely important, useful. But I also want to see it as ultranationalism. And I want to make the distinction in a very simple way; whereas nationalism is really about bringing people together and building an identity, ultranationalism is focused on naming enemies, on demanding constant allegiance, on constantly proving allegiance. Hindutva is ultranationalism in that sense. It’s really not interested in nation building.

I have found it very useful to go back to an old text by Arthur Rosenberg. He has a very clear understanding that fascism is a mass movement. It is not just a political seizure of power. It includes an antiliberal strain. He uses the term counterrevolutionary capitalism, but we can just say neoliberal capitalism, for example, to explain how fascism is very antilabor.

But he also argues that mass fascist movements also call for national renewal and fascism offers itself as the redemption. That redemptive power is where I will try to connect with what Ajantha is asking us to think about.

There’s something about redemption in Hindutva.

 

AS: In terms of the populist character of Hindutva, what makes it authoritarian populist? When we think about populism, a distinction is drawn between the people and the elites. Hindutva is not about the people and the elites. It is certainly about an enemy that the nation is against, and the enemy is a moving target. It can be the Muslim, it can be the liberal, it can be the secularist, it can be any number of things. But the fact that this is a form of populism that is yoked to counterrevolutionary capitalism—this is not about class elites, right? Class elites are not the enemy.

So can you say more about the class character of this form of populism, which is quite different from, say, labor populism?

 

BN: I would suggest that Hindutva is very clear on the “them.” It is having a hard time constructing a people (an “us”), because people are undisciplined, and they’re all over the place. It’s very hard to construct a coherent people with the Hindutva movement. Some parts of their commitment to antiliberalism and antilabor, or neoliberal, capitalism, leads them to come down hard on folks who may otherwise be part of “the people.” It’s rife with those types of internal contradictions.

Why, then, has it been so successful? Hindutva has become the self-styled speaker for Hindus and Hinduism. Going back to Hannah Arendt’s thinking—the house of Hinduism was vacated by a lot of us who thought of ourselves as secular, even nonbelievers, and who ended up not paying any attention to who’s going to the temples, who is attending these sermons.

The second thing that I want to offer is that there are ways in which Hindutva materially manifests itself through producing religious symbols, in constantly proliferating them. We see it on TV. People switch on the television and the number of channels that are devoted to religion has expanded, as it has also in film, in Bollywood and Kollywood. So when they switch that on, there is a lot of media that has Hindutva embedded in its messaging.

My point is that we should start focusing not on the clearly rabid folks, of which there are many, but on the even more numerous folks who are not so rabid, but who casually consume and listen to some of this stuff. We should address these spheres in which Hindus are constructed as a people in the image of Hindutva.

 

LA: One of the elements I’ve been very interested in is the role of these street thugs, whether it’s the cow vigilantes or the love jihad policers.

I’ve been wondering how a movement convinces so many, especially young men, to produce quite so much violent energy. It takes effort to go out into the streets and do these things. And I’m wondering about what kind of gratification is enjoyed by these guys in what maybe we can call the field work of Hindutva.

And I was reading this book, Dreamers, by a journalist with a great ethnographic sensibility, Snigdha Poonam. She has a chapter called “The Angry Young Men,” where she focuses on a couple of guys who talk about how their role in the Hindutva movement gave them a sense of power, a sense of prestige in their neighborhoods. And they achieve it through violence and wielding power over others.

Do you have any thoughts about where the kernels of that longing for power come from, and what is the process by which Hindutva has grown those kernels?

 

BN: Anyone who has done work on gangs sees that it is really not ideology only; what’s involved is the material social relations of belonging, of having support. Hindutva has for a very long time built an array of organizations that work at the lowest level, such as at the administrative level, in civil society. They’ll be sought to solve the really banal everyday life issues. I think Thomas Hansen’s work on the Shiv Sena, for example, talks about some of this stuff, where he shows that they actually have these “shakha” models, these small cells, that are in every neighborhood. Their job is not to preach, their job is not to actually do ideological work. That’s for the pracharaks [preachers/ideologues]. They are the ones who will deal with everyday needs, like setting up a gym.

 

LA: They offer services, essentially. They actually help people.

 

BN: That’s right.

 

LA: I wonder if seeing how Hindutva groups have helped people is also a way for us to think about the cracks into the system or levers for offering an alternative system.

 

BN: Yes. In fact, this is the job of the left. It has done this job through organizing trade unions, for example. But Hindutva’s onslaught on labor has challenged any kind of unionism and collectivism. We would be remiss if we didn’t bring in the issue of the upwardly mobile and successful capitalist classes, the managerial classes, who have participated in the Hindutva project through chest-thumping about India’s arrival on the global scene. Their crowing about how India has a successful economy and has much to teach the world.

They are complicit. In allowing India—not just Hindus—to be represented by Hindutva by cynically repurposing a very basic, rudimentary, anticolonial or anti-Western language. Hindutva has tapped into that social psychology. It has mass appeal across castes—as is regularly shown. I don’t think we should assume that some castes, especially subaltern castes, are impervious to the attractions of Hindutva.

 

AS: I wonder, since we’re sitting in the United States, if we can end with a question about the United States and the difference between Hindutva here and Hindutva in India. Because one of the things that Lori and I have been talking about is some of the differences that we see in the way Hindutva activists position themselves, especially relative to liberalism.

Hindutva discourse in India doesn’t even bother to claim a liberal mantle. In fact, it’s antiliberal and very explicitly so. And conversely, when you look at the United States and the way these activists position themselves, they’re making use of liberal ideals.

 

LA: And institutions.

 

AS: And institutions. They deploy the language of religious tolerance, of minority rights, all sorts of things. They’re using the courts to argue on the grounds of injured sentiment, falsely claiming that they suffer from Hindu-phobia. They’re using identity politics.

So what do you make of this two-pronged approach, in which Hindu nationalists are able to be liberal subjects in one context and virulently illiberal in the other? Is there a contradiction here that those of us who are trying to combat Hindutva can utilize? I’d like to end on a more hopeful note about oppositional strategies.

BN: Yeah, I think there is a documented history of material aid to Hindutva that comes in the form of money, hard money from the US. We’ve called it the saffron dollar in some of the works that have come out that document the amount of money that goes from here to various organizations that belong to the Hindutva family of organizations. So I just want to say that that is the foundational material reality.

If we follow the money behind the Hindutva movement and put pressures on these institutions or individuals in particular ways, we can rein in that flow. Nobody who is in the US should be seen as supporting completely vile actions somewhere else and then pretend to not know about it, because scholars are increasingly making it visible.

 

AS: You’ve got to follow the money.

 

BN: That’s right. Yes, there are contradictions, and yes, we can push at those contradictions, because there are many elected representatives of Indian origin, Indian-origin people, and hopefully more heterogeneous people who are now in the upper echelons of corporate America, as well as middle managers in software companies, but also working-class, Indian-origin populations.

We need to push the argument that one cannot benefit from liberalism here while supporting some kind of deeply antiliberal project in India. It is even more important for us to be anticaste, but not anti-Hindu. The right wing will be hoisted on their own petard when it deploys claims about Hindu phobia. That’s the kind of strategic politics one needs to arrive at.

I am afraid we are not there yet. When we do anticaste politics here, it frequently fuels the right wing. Can we do it in a different way? I believe so. It’s not only logically possible, it is strategically necessary. 

Featured image: The Babri Masjid mosque, Faizabad, India (now Ayodhya), ca. 1863–1887, by Samuel Bourne / Wikimedia Commons. The mosque was demolished by Hindu nationalists in 1992.