Fascism in India: Race, Caste, and Hindutva

Historian Sabastian debuts with an astute intellectual history of Hindutva, the Hindu nationalist movement, that focuses on how it differs from European fascism. Tracing an eclectic collection of 20th-century thinkers who promoted the dominance of the Hindu race, Sabastian notes that many mainstream Indian theorists were, during the colonial period, critics of eurocentrism and had great faith in “India’s capacity to produce universality” after a British exit. But political theorists like Benoy Sarkar and Vinayak Damodar Savarkar saw an opportunity for a return to Hindu sovereignty after centuries of British and Mughal rule. Hinduism itself was redefined away from a meditative religious practice into a political movement that “mirrored” the Muslims it saw as its enemies, becoming more warriorlike and less concerned with internal divisions of caste. Indeed, a distinguishing characteristic of Indian fascism, Sabastian cannily argues, is its ability to annihilate the “other” not through exclusion but through forced absorption: while German fascism was obsessed with the idea of “purity,” Indian fascism imagines that Indian Muslims are actually Hindus who must be reclaimed. This belief takes on a particularly grotesque form where women are concerned, with Hindutva ideologue Vinayak Damodar Savarkar promoting the mass rape of Muslim women during the 1947 Partition—a practice that continues, Sebastian notes, with mass rape occurring during the 2002 Gujarat riots. The result is a sharp look at how Hindutva aims to achieve its totalizing objectives. (Dec.)