Curating Collective Memory: Victimhood and Trauma in Hindu Nationalism

• In Event: Nationalism, Communalism, and Hindu-Muslim Relations in South Asia

Abstract

This paper traces transformations in the language of vulnerability, victimhood, and collective trauma across four phases of Hindu nationalist thought from 1820 to 2022. I argue that since the BJP’s rise to power in 2014, politicians, writers, educators, and fundamentalist activists have recast Hindu collective memory through the lens of shared trauma in an attempt to bolster demands for a "hindū rāshṭra" (Hindu state). To understand what prompted this “trauma turn” among Hindu nationalists, I investigate the language of collective suffering in the writings of influential right-wing thinkers. In the paper’s first section, I contend that reformist groups mapped contemporary anxieties onto the remote past to instantiate a condition of perpetual victimhood in the Hindu collective imagination. Next, I turn to the Hindu populist movement to argue that independence activists relied on religious metaphors to depict Hindus as collectively vulnerable. The third section of the paper considers the contributions of ideologues like V.D. Sāvarkar and M.S. Golwalkar, who add an element of imagined conspiracy to the movement. In the final section, I turn to contemporary developments in the religious right-wing movement which, I argue, place a greater emphasis on national traumas like Partition and the 1990 Kashmiri Exodus. With this shift, I maintain that the BJP has pushed the rhetoric of victimhood into the realm of discrete doctrine in an effort to use post-Holocaust human rights heuristics to garner international support for their crackdown on “Muslim terrorism.” I conclude with some reflections on democratic erosion and the global surge in right-wing politics. I suggest that the rise of Hindu nationalism in India provides a useful lesson for postcolonial democracies, by demonstrating that the demos constituted after independence invites ethnonationalist incursions.

Author

• Maya Nandakumar