The Rhetoric of Hindu India: Language and Urban Nationalism

by Manisha Basu

Overview

This book examines the late twentieth-century rise of the urban, right-wing Hindu nationalist ideology known as metropolitan Hindutva. This ideology, the book assesses, aspires to be a pan-Indian, urban form that is home to the emerging, digitally enabled, technocratic middle classes of the nation. Through close analyses of the writings of a range of self-styled public intellectuals, from Arun Shourie and Swapan Dasgupta to Chetan Bhagat and Amish Tripathi, this book maps this new avatar of Hindutva. Finally, in analyzing the language of metropolitan Hindutva, it arrives at an emerging idea of India as part of what Amitav Ghosh has called a contemporary Anglophone empire. This is the first extended scholarly effort to theorize a politics of language in relation to the dangers of such an imperializing Hindutva.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781107149878
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	11/02/2016
Pages:	227
Product dimensions:	6.30(w) x 9.33(h) x 0.79(d)

About the Author

Manisha Basu teaches in the Department of English at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Her research interests are postcolonial theory and literatures, nationalism and philology, secularism, globalization, African literatures, literary theory and cultural studies, South Asian literatures and cultures, and language and imperialism.

Table of Contents

Preface; 1. Introductory matters: the strange case of secular India; 2. Time's victims in a Second Republic: new histories, new temporalities; 3. To make free and let die: the economics of metropolitan Hindutva; 4. A power over life and rebirth: V. D. Savarkar and the essentials of Hindutva; 5. Between death and redemption: Hindu India and its antique Others; 6. The afterlife of Indian writing in English: telematic managers, journalistic mantras.

Editorial Reviews

‘The Rhetoric of Hindu India is a timely and productive addition to South Asian studies, and its theoretical and methodological frameworks have an applicability beyond the Indian context. The book engenders further conversations about the public(s) that the rhetoric of metropolitan Hindutva gives rise to, the consideration of what makes India 'Hindu' and whether literatures in vernacular languages mimic the movements that Basu has masterfully traced within Anglophone literature.’ Nabeel Jafri, International Journal of Hindu Studies

From the Publisher