Ajantha Subramanian & Lori Allen at Public Books: 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.
The conversation/interview >>
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.
