Hindu nationalism, cultural spaces, and bodily practices in India

Abstract

With the opening of India to the global economy, technology, and culture, questions of national identity are being starkly posed and tested. An attendant rise in militant Hindu nationalism can be seen as a bold strategic response to this question as it attempts to place India among the most powerful nations in global modernity. Analyses of this attempt to fundamentally transform India have tended to be pitched at the institutional levels of economics and politics, yet the Hindu nationalist methodology is essentially a cultural project. This article will examine two forms of embodied cultural practices in India, each offering a contrasting set of cultural meanings and political possibilities and each highlighting the complexities and contradictions of the globalization-nationalism nexus in contemporary India.