Re: Hindu Nationalism: Origins, Ideologies, and Modern Myths.
by Debashish on Sun 28 Jan 2007 09:55 AM PST Profile Permanent Link I do not know what Bhatt means by characterizing Hindu nationalism as “a dense cluster of ideologies of primordialism” - perhaps he is talking of divine origin myths, but a much more nuanced view of Hindu nationalism is offered by Wilhelm Halbfass who uses the phrase "cluster of traditions" to characterize the history of Hindu self-identification evolving through time and persisting through cultural transformations of the kind that Bhatt also recognizes
To study "Hindu nationalism" as a political/religious/cultural/spiritual plural discursive phenomenon with its unique and evolving social manifestations (far exceeding in scope any nostalgic ideology of primordialism or monolithic essentialism) one has to trace its history carefully at the least from the Gupta period in India. A contemporary state-sponsored Hindutva can form only one strand of such a discourse. DB
by Rich on Sun 28 Jan 2007 10:34 AM PST Profile Permanent Link Well at least it seems that Bhatt has attempted to parse Hindu Nationalism with a more refined hermenuetic instrument than the reductive methods of authors such as Jyotimaya Sharma, who appear to trace the phenomena back to a sampradaya; a guru lineage of Hindu nationalist. I also think it extremely important to recognize what Halbfass categorizes as "a cluster of traditions" regards Vedantic or Hindu identification. Too often modern commentators (even those I largely agree with such as Pankaj Mishra) simply dismiss Hinduism as a social construction based on European ideas of nationalism. (somehow I see this tendency as akin to the post-colonial notion of Orientalism which as Deb eloquently put it does not recognize the dialectic between its mystical and predatory aspects) rc
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