Author: David Ludden
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Year: 2005
Language: English
Pages: 350
ISBN/UPC (if available): 0195672488
Description
The rise of Hindu nationalism in India has been an integral feature of political developments and cultural change over the last few decades. Accomplished by electoral means as well as by aggressive politics and vast media influence, the ascendancy of Hindutva has been the focus of serious attention in academic debates.
Written in the aftermath of the Babri Masjid demolition, Making India Hindu brings together the work of eminent scholars to provide an interdisciplinary perspective on communalism in India.
With an in-depth Introduction and a new Preface, these essays show how Hindutva’s spreading and deepening influence ahs drawn sustenance from cultural trends that permeate modern India history and from multifarious media that propagate Hindutva.
While the first edition helped explain the rise of Hindutva across the world in the 1980s, the second edition, updated to the 2004 elections, highlights the direct and indirect operations of Hindutva within India’s political mainstream.
An incisive analysis of current events by Ludden and a thoroughly revised bibliography make the second edition of this classic a significant read for historians, political scientists, and students and scholars interested in the role of politics, religion, and nationalism in South Asia.
REVIEWS
The most encouraging feature of this book is the willingness of so many established scholars to confront the inescapable mystery of the phenomenon of communalism. The richness of the resultant fare is, for once, commensurate with the legitimately baffling complexity of the phenomenon.
-Alok Rai, The Book Review
Seeks to provide a window on the world of conflict that developed inside nationalism around the globe in the 1980s.
-Harsh Sethi, The Hindu
It presents an array of different opinions and enables the problem to be seen from different perspectives and through different intellectual lenses.
-H Y Sharada Prasad, Biblio
Contents
PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION
PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS
INTRODUCTION
Ayodhya: A Window on the World
PART 1: MOBILIZING HINDUTVA
The Iconography of Rama's Chariot
Mass Movement or Elite Conspiracy? The Puzzle of Hindu Nationalism
Communal Mobilization and Changing Majority in Uttar Pradesh
Mass Media: Images, Mobilization, and Communalism
PART 2: GENEALOGIES OF HINDU AND MUSLIM
Music, the Media, and Communal Relations in North India, Past and Present
Soldier Monks and Militant Sadhus
Imagining Hindurashtra: The Hindu and the Muslim in Bankim Chandra's Writings
The Myth of Unity: Colonial and National Narratives
PART 3: COMMUNITY AND CONFLICT
Contesting in Public: Colonial Legacies and Contemporary Communalism
Communalism and Modernity
Writing Violence
Indian Nationalism and the Politics of Hindutva
GLOSSARY
BIBLIOGRAPHY
LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS
INDEX