Violent Gods: Hindu Nationalism in India’s Present – Narratives from Orissa

Violent Gods is an erudite and elegiac exploration of Hindu nationalism in India today.

Tracing the continuities between Hindutva and Hindu cultural dominance, this book maps the architectures of civic and despotic governmentalities contouring Hindu nationalism in public, domestic, and everyday life. In chronicling concerted action against Christians and Muslims, Adivasis and Dalits, through spectacles, events, public executions, the riots in Kandhamal of December 2007 and August-September 2008, the planned, methodical politics of terror unfolds in its multiple registers.

At the intersections of Anthropology, Postcolonial, Subaltern, and South Asia Studies, Angana P. Chatterji asks critical 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.

Contents

Gratitude

One: Memory-Mournings

Explanations
Text, Counter-Memory
Why Orissa?
HinduCultural Dominance, Hindutva/ization
Secularization
Biopolitics

Two: Dispositif

Roots
Stratagem
Nationscapes in Ascendancy
‘Paradesi’
‘Paraaya’
Normativity

Three: Impunity

Dislocation-IndoctriNation
Education
Governance
Economies of Violence
Dispossession
Struggles Over Land

Four: Erasures

In Jagatsinghpur, Jesus is the Son of a Subaltern God
Conversion/‘Re’conversion
‘Where Is Your God Now?’
Nation’s ‘Other’
A Collision of Histories

Five: Processions of Violence

Absences
Riots in Kandhamal, December 2007
‘Violent Gods’: Riots in Kandhamal, August 2008

Bibliography
Index

Angana P. Chatterji is a feminist anthropologist and historian of the present. Her recent writings include the co-edited volume, Contesting Nation: Gendered Violence in South Asia (2012), Land and Justice: The Struggle for Cultural Survival , a co-contributed anthology, Kashmir, with Tariq Ali, Arundhati Roy et al. (2011), and the report, Buried Evidence: Unknown, Unmarked, and Mass Graves in Kashmir (2009), for which she was the lead author. Chatterji is Co-chair of a project on armed conflict, mass violence, and people’s rights, focusing on issues of conflict resolution and transitional justice, and healing, historical dialogue, and memory.

A scholar, public intellectual, and educator, her work spans issues of post-colonial critique and counter-memory; militarization, gendered violences, and securitization as they contravene human rights; and religion in the public sphere as it shapes minoritization. She has also worked with issues of public forest lands reform, cultural survival, and customary and indigenous land rights. Chatterji was co-founder of the International People’s Tribunal on Human Rights and Justice in Kashmir.