RE- HISTORICISING AND RECLAIMING HISTORY - A GAMBIT OF EGEMONIC HINDUTVA IN AN ETHNOCENTRIC ETHOS

Year 2023, Volume: 12 Issue: 1, 18 - 39, 30.10.2023

Purbali Sengupta

Abstract

Riding on a brutal agenda of majoritarian politics, the BJP government is relentlessly running a state propaganda with textual invasion. In an Althusserian sense this cultural hegemony of interpellating individuals as ‘Hindu Subjects’ has seen significant rise with the aid of media and rhetoric of demagoguery. History has become a focal point to fabricate a flawed narrative of Nation and Nationalism which focuses fundamentally on an essentialised Hindu identity. Following the legacy of Murli Manohar Joshi who initiated the design of new school curriculum attuned to Hindu nationalist ideology, BJP ruled states are allegedly re-writing history to give it a right-wing touch with crucial improvisations made to depict Hindu rulers as victors in battles against the Islamic ‘Other’. Paul Gilroy, critiquing post-second world-war multiracial, British society for its obsession with the crisis in ‘Englishness’ offered History as an antidote against the crippling effect of nostalgia. Contemporary Indian society is grappling with a similar neo-racism founded on discourses of cultural difference that constructs the non-Hindu as an anti-nationalist outsider. This paper intends to formulate an intervention into the cultural debates of the day and create an alternate vantage point through theories of cosmopolitanism and transculturalism that could help us rethink identities.

Keywords

History, Nationalism, Hindutva, Ideology, Cosmopolitanism, Transculturalism

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