The Rhetoric of Hindu India

Language and Urban Nationalism

Author: Manisha Basu

This book examines the late twentieth-century rise of the urban, right-wing Hindu nationalist ideology known as metropolitan Hindutva.

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Summary

This book examines the late twentieth-century rise of the urban, right-wing Hindu nationalist ideology known as metropolitan Hindutva.

Description

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.

Critic 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”

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.