Author Description

"The Secret Life of An Other Indian Nationalism is a study of the genealogy of right-wing Indian nationalism. Identifying two different kinds of nationalisms, the proposal focuses on exclusivist (Savarkar) as distinct from inclusivist Indian nationalism (Gandhi) that would deny belonging to a major section of the population. At its core are the Mer, a forest community that was subject to violent colonial conquest and sedentarisation and later to the colonisation of the mind through popular history and ideological religion. This book tracks the conjuncture of this community, ideology and texts over two centuries, from 1820 to 2019 based on conventional, textual and oral history archives. Two of the main themes of the book are popular history and popular religion. It examines how religious nationalism fabricates a popular and phantasmagorical history to craft identity, individual and collective, and details how the modern category of "religion" fostered by Hindutva seeks to overlay the complex world of lived Hinduism"--