"‘Violent
Gods'is an exploration of Hindu nationalism in India today. It
details the mobilization of Hindu militant organizations as an
authoritarian movement manifest throughout culture, polity, state,
and economy, in religion and law, and class and caste, on gender,
body, land, and memory... across the nation. The book explores
that ways in which Hindu cultural dominance is manufacturing
India, an emergent empire, as a ‘Hindu-secular'/Hindu majoritarian
state.
"As a woman of
postcolonial India, of Hindu descent, ‘mixed' caste heritage, the
book is a journey in speaking with history. In freeing itself from
British dominion in 1947, the Indian nation was shaped, in great
part, by the will of the Hindu majority. Hindu cultural dominance
has substantially defined what constitutes the ‘secular' and
‘democratic' in India today. Accountability demands that those of
us with privilege in relation to ‘nation' speak up, intervene.
Telling a story of Hindu dominance in India is an intervention,
‘telling' is a call to action.
"This book maps what I have witnessed --
the architecture of civic and despotic governmentality contouring
Hindu majoritarianism and nationalism in public, domestic, and
everyday life. It chronicles the sustained and unchecked violences
against minority Christian and Muslim communities, Adivasis
(tribals) and Dalits (former ‘untouchable' groups), and women, as
well as sexual identity groups and children.
The book is a genealogical exploration of Hindu nationalism in
India, with an ethnographic focus on Orissa, in eastern India,
where Hindu nationalism's terror has been prevalent since the
1990s, and where planned riots against minority peoples were
carried out in 2007 and 2008. The research was conducted between
2002-2008 in urban and rural settings across Orissa in 66
villages, 11 towns, and four cities. The book records spectacles,
events, public executions, the riots in Kandhamal of December 2007
and August-September 2008, as we witness the planned, methodical
politics of terror unfold in its multiple registers.
In writing the book, I have made eighteen research trips to
Orissa, and engaged in advocacy work on the issue. In 2005-2006, I
convened the Orissa People's Tribunal on Communalism, which was
targeted, and its women members threatened with violence, by Hindu
militant groups. See Human Rights Watch:
The book is situated at the intersections of
Anthropology, Postcolonial, Subaltern, and South Asia Studies, and
asks questions of nation making, cultural nationalism, and
subaltern disenfranchisement. As a Foucauldian history of the
present, this text asserts the role of ethical knowledge
production as counter-memory. Through situated reflection,
experimental storytelling, and ethnographic accounts, it excavates
Hindutva/Hindu supremacist proliferations in manufacturing
imaginative and identitarian agency for violent nationalism.
At the release of the book in Orissa in April 2009, I was asked if
the book would provide solutions for undoing Hindu militancy and
dominance in India. Books, if we are so fortunate, complicate
matters further. I remain hopeful that "Violent Gods" will
energize discussion, debate, contemplation about India's present
and future, the role and violence of majoritarian states and
groups globally, about privilege and subalternity, security,
rights, and entitlements, about freedom and dissent. I remain
hopeful that the many and powerful subaltern voices and narratives
in the text will compel reflection.
The learning and advocacy that led to the book has engulfed and
motivated me since 2002, and facilitated shifts in my thinking,
empowered me to act, to take risks as an intellectual and
activist. And, for people with prolific courage that supported its
writing, with their stories, their lives, at risk of reprisal -- I
am grateful.
In India, we witnessed the ethnic cleansing of Sikhs in Delhi and
elsewhere in 1984, genocidal violence against Muslims in Gujarat
in 2002, calculated and sustained brutality against Christians in
Orissa in 2007 and 2008, and the continued subjugation of
Indian-administered Kashmir. On and on... We need to think, act,
change. NOW.