Prem Kumar Vijayan

In the previous Unit, you have been introduced to some of the major theories of and approaches towards nationalism. You have learnt how to understand and define the concept of the nation, as well as the various factors involved in these understandings and definitions, such as ethnicity, culture, language, race and gender. You have also been introduced to some of the issues that have been central to the debates around nationalism, such as territoriality, common heritage, the invention of histories and traditions. In addition, you have been introduced to feminist perspectives on nations and nationalism, on the issues noted above, as well as on the ways in which masculinity and femininity are deployed in these nationalist discourses.

This paper critically assesses the usefulness of the “new-Orientalism” thesis in understanding the discourses around the idea of “terrorism” and of “the terrorist”. It observes that critiques of “new Orientalism” provide important insights into the ways in which “Islam”, “the Muslim” and “terrorist” have come to be constructed. However, it also argues for the importance of the density of historical context and specificity of locality in understanding how these categories are formulated. The case of Bombay cinema is particularly instructive here. The paper argues that Bombay cinema – which has engaged with these concerns in some form since its inception, and is going “global” in unprecedented ways – exemplifies both the play of these two distinct discursive tendencies and also the tensions that arise because they are not identical. Post-9/11 films like Aamir (2008) and New York (2009) manifest these discursive mechanics and the tensions that result from the play between “new Orientalism” and the local.

One of the central arguments of my recent book, Gender and Hindu Nationalism: Understanding Masculine Hegemony, is that all hegemonic formations are also gendered hegemonies, or masculine hegemonies. This paper attempts to elaborate this formulation in the context of the university, both as an idea and as a real-world space. Universities are – at least theoretically – supposed to be gender-neutral and heterogenised spaces that ostensibly encourage questioning, tolerate dissent and
support the co-existence of diverse, even contradictory perspectives. The paper argues that, contrary to such expectations, universities are structured and operationalised as strongly gendered sites, implicitly and explicitly upholding the hegemonic perspectives and dispositions that prevail outside them. It also argues that at least one reason for this is the relation of knowledge to power; another is the relation of knowledge to money – and consequently, the attendant implications of these for the
institutionalisation of knowledge in the disciplinary and organisational structures of universities, and in its financial arrangements. A further significant factor in the production and dissemination of knowledge in universities is the role of such institutions in the containment and regulation of knowledge. The paper tries to explicate these questions by referring to the structures and dynamics of specific universities in India. Finally, the paper seeks to use the analytical framework of 'masculine hegemony' to unravel the mechanisms by which such gendered
hegemonies are perpetuated even within spaces like the university, and argues that sites of knowledge transmission like universities serve ultimately to perpetuate the masculine hegemonies that they are molded by.

Among the many complexities of contemporary India is the steady increase in the numbers, frequency, pervasiveness and intensity, of structural encounters between diverse, even contradictory forces and agencies. These include, among others, caste, communal, linguistic, and ethnic encounters; but perhaps the most fundamental, persistent and pervasive kind of encounter, especially over the last few decades, has been the quadripolar ones between (a) left-wing extremist (LWE) forces, also referred to generically as 'Naxals', 'Naxalites' and/or 'Maoists'; (b) the Indian state; (c) the tribal populations of central and western India, especially in Madhya Pradesh, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, Odisha and Maharashtra; and (d) large multinational industrial corporations, of both Indian and foreign origin, seeking to establish operations in these areas. The multivalent, multilayered and often overlapping and intersecting nature of these encounters is one important reason for their characterisation as 'cosmopolitical'. The other is the persistence and pervasiveness of certain specific dynamics of encounter, even in and through this diversity of kinds of encounters. This article addresses some of these issues.

This article revisits the concept and practice of 'collective bargaining' through its institutionalised forms, the trade union and the professional association. It explores the political dynamics at work in these institutions, to see how effective they can be as institutions of social intervention and transformation.

This paper looks at the issue of sexual violence through the framework of toxic masculinity. It analyses the ways in which patriarchal formations draw on and reinforce such masculinities, using gender and sexual violence, to reinforce the dominance of men.

[A few sentences from the opening of the chapter, in lieu of an abstract]

Students are often perceived to be ‘unruly subjects’. This chapter discusses these ‘unruly subjects’ as political subjects. It will frame this discussion around three deeply intertwined questions:

What is entailed in this perception of the subject as ‘unruly subject’, i.e. how should we understand this phrase?
What are the relations between the subject, qua subject, as this ‘unruly subject’, and as a ‘political subject’?
What are, or could be, the politics of this ‘unruly subject’?

This paper will examine the ways in which ‘Hindutva’, or Hindu nationalism, has used the electronic media, especially the internet, in its growth to power.
Several studies have already explored its close relationship to the spread of television in India, accounting in particular for the creation of a hegemonic discourse around the identity 'Hindu', and the religion 'Hinduism', especially since the 1980s.
This paper will briefly outline the audio-visual manufacturing, through the expansion of television, of a hegemonic imagination of the nation as a 'Hindu' one. It will then
    1) chart the subsequent extension and amplification of this imaginary, in and through the emergence and rapid spread of IT communication systems, including the exponential growth in IT-capable cellular phone usage.
    2) outline the consequent transformations of social spaces and the emergence of a ‘virtual public sphere’ that transcends the more conventional boundaries of ‘public’ and ‘private’, as well as of ‘nation’.
    3) trace the impact of these, as well as of the commercial interests that produce this ‘virtual public sphere’, on the discourses of gendered nationalism that constitute Hindutva.
    4) profile the kind of gendered citizen-subject that is produced through these transformations and discourses, as well as the conditions (of access to that ‘virtual public sphere’) within and through which such a subject is produced.
    5) argue that there are vast demographies that are excluded from access to these imaginations of the nation, because lacking either technological access, literacy skills or financial means.
It will conclude with the suggestion that this exclusion is the clearest indicator of the power of Brahminical masculine hegemony, as a deeply entrenched system of social exclusion and negation, to re-establish itself, albeit tacitly.

To enslave a nation, just sell its minds: Why the HECI Bill is a surgical strike to privatise higher education in India
Divestment of UGC regulations, criminalisation of non-compliance, opening floodgates of privatisation and profit-mongering, shedding permanent teaching faculty in the name of autonomy — the proposed Higher Education Commission of India is a catastrophe waiting to happen.

This article looks at why 'autonomy' is being rammed through, even in the face of stiff opposition from teachers and students. It examines the (not very positive) implications of such a policy for higher education in India, and predicts that it will result in enormous social costs.

This paper seeks to examine the relation between democracy and violence. It will first offer an historical overview of the emergence of democracy in relation to three major political events: the English civil war from 1640-1660; the American war of independence and the drafting of the Bill of Rights; and the French Revolution. It will propose that, apart from the fact that each of these struggles was marked by large-scale and protracted violence, they also shared a common discourse – the discourse of rights, understood proprietorially. The paper will argue that the emergence of democracy as articulated through this discourse of proprietorial rights was, in turn, closely related to the emergence of the contemporary form of the nation-state, and that, consequently, it is founded on a paradox: the discourse of the nation (or nationalism) has been historically an exclusivist one, while the discourse of democracy seeks, by definition, to be inclusive. It will argue that the colonial moment served on the one hand, to disseminate the discourses of nationalism and democracy; while on the other, it complicated the paradoxical relation between them further, when the discourse of rights (integral to both) often emphasized community rights over individual rights, at least in colonial South Asia. The contours of community, then and since, have been overwhelmingly determined by the personal law system and the communal patriarchates. Given that, this paper will argue that the tensions between the exclusivism of such communalisms and the inclusivism of the democratic discourse leads inevitably to the production of cultures of violence. It will conclude by questioning the sustainability of a rights-based understanding of democracy.

The publication of the ‘Report on a Policy Frame Work for Reforms in Education’ in 2000 saw the initiation of a major shift in policy formulation for higher education in India, a shift that has sustained, albeit with varying pace, independent of the ideology or political programme of the government in power. The report, also known as the Birla-Ambani report, was co-authored by Mukesh Ambani and Kumaramangalam Birla, each the respective head of two of the most powerful business houses in India, with rapidly growing global presence and influence (for instance, the Ambanis own most of the major production houses in Hollywood today). That it was commissioned by the Prime Minister's Council on Trade and Industry is a telling indicator of the direction the state was already looking in, regarding policy changes in higher education. The report set the agenda for the series of further reports, policy initiatives and eventually, legislative measures that followed, including - among others - the report of the government’s own National Knowledge Commission (2009); the University Grants Commission’s paper on ‘Strategies and Schemes during Eleventh Plan Period (2007-2012) for Universities and Colleges’ (2010); the planning-paper ‘Higher Education in India: Twelfth Five Year Plan (2012–2017) and Beyond’ (2012), collaboratively produced by the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI), Ernst & Young Pvt. Ltd. (a multination consultancy) and the Planning Commission of the Government of India; and the Ministry of Human Resource Development’s own National Higher Education Mission document (2013), apart from the drafting of six bills on higher education, collectively referred to as the New Education Bills, currently awaiting passage in the Indian Parliament.
All of these documents and initiatives are focused, to varying degrees, on (a) opening the educational sector to foster greater private initiatives and and encourage more local and international investors; (b) tailoring curricula and syllabi, as well as educational schedules, to meet the expectations and requirements of commerce and industry; (c) synchronize the Indian higher education system with its global (read European and American) counterparts, to allow for easy movement of personnel and students between the systems; (d) encourage the use of (especially but not only) information and communication technology in all educational spheres; (e) introduce systems of calibration and evaluation of teaching based on various criteria of “productivity”; (f) introduce systems of regulation and accountability of time spent “on the job” aimed essentially at actively depoliticizing campus spaces, but ostensibly to enforce discipline and encourage research and publication; (g) shift increasingly towards contract-based employment, and away from permanent tenures; and (h) introduce measures that will either roll back, bypass or otherwise render redundant the various provisions of affirmative action for socially and economically weaker sections.
This paper aims to examine and analyze these documents and legislations along the following lines: (a) to identify and expose the politics of the various provisions and prohibitions espoused in them; (b) to outline the possible ramifications and implications for higher education, in their implementation; and (c) to comment on their relations to larger economic, social and policy changes that are underway in India currently. The paper will also briefly discuss the effectivity (or lack thereof) of judicial review of such processes, by way of discussing courses of action, through reference to a specific case that the author was party to.

Hindu nationalism has seen a dramatic growth in India and abroad from the nineteen eighties. This growth has coincided with – and relates in complex ways to – several other highly significant developments, including (in no particular order) the instituting of liberalization in the economy; the legislation on reservations for ‘Other Backward Castes’ and its implementation; the intensification of the integration of the middle classes into the global economy; and the intensifying pauperization of the rural poor. These developments as well as Hindu nationalism’s links with them have been the subject of scholarly attention from a variety of perspectives and disciplines. Apart from these however, one may also note the unfolding of less obvious, but equally significant and related developments in this period: the growth and intensification of female feticide and infanticide; the increase in dowry related violence and deaths; the targeting of women as objects of sexual violence, especially during communal riots, but also routinely; the increasing presence of women in rightwing organizations and mobilizations; an intensification in the policing of sexual discourses and sexuality; conversely and paradoxically, there has also been an increase in the visibility of women in the public sphere (through for instance, the widening of options for employment for women). Feminist scholarship has addressed several of these issues, independently and in their intersections; it has also addressed the rise of Hindu nationalism. However, there is little work on the relations that obtain between these issues and the more obvious ones set out above. Specifically, there was and remains a serious deficiency of attention to the relations between masculinity and Hindu nationalism. This study hopes to contribute towards addressing this deficiency in several ways. Firstly, it seeks to locate itself in the theoretical and analytical spaces between gender studies and political economy. It attempts to do so by reviewing and then parting from, the dominant trends in the theoretical and analytical debates on men and masculinity. In my thesis I have therefore focused, not on kinds and forms of masculinity – which remains the dominant approach in masculinity studies – but on the ways in which institutions, organizations and structures come to be gendered, and consequently, on the processes of gendering that are invoked in the articulation and elaboration of power within specific structural, institutional and/or organizational relations. I have sought to develop this argument specifically with regard to masculinity/ies by proposing the idea of ‘masculine hegemony’. Briefly, through this term I wish to suggest that uneven power distribution may be understood in Gramscian hegemonic terms, and that this hegemony is usually gendered as masculine. Any given society is organised along multiple and intersecting hierarchies of domination and subordination that determine the access to and exercise of power – the distribution and possession of its resources and rights – within it, as well as the terms within which that power is (to be) exercised. Further, the organisation of these hierarchies may be discerned as hegemonic formations that favour specific social groups and/or alignments. Any given hegemonic condition is thus layered by multiple and intersecting hierarchies of domination and subordination that extend far beyond conventionally recognised macro manifestations –race, nation, region, religion, community, class – to its manifestations at the fundamental ‘cellular’ (or in Gramsci’s terms, ‘molecular’) level of the family and the organisation of sexuality. Thus, while the multi-layered hegemonic formations that constitute the given hegemonic condition are all diversely marked by other signs – of race, class, age, region, religion, etc – they are all inflected by the foundational discourse of gender. This is the broad theoretical perspective within which the thesis is elaborated, because it provides for the multiple articulation of complex phenomena with each other, across history as well as across regions. Based on this, and secondly, it seeks to approach the issue of Hindu nationalism from a historical perspective. The study therefore begins by chronologically examining the term ‘Hindu’ and the various semantic and social transformations in its history, beginning with its early derivation from ‘Indus’, through the medieval period when it gradually but nebulously came to identify a community, to its coalescence into the more concrete religio-social entity that emerged through the colonial encounter and the caste and other reform movements of the nineteenth century, to its politicization under B G Tilak and V D Savarkar (among others) into a religio-cultural nationalism in the early part of the twentieth century. Crucial to understanding this evolution, the study argues, is the pan-Indian spread of the Brahmin castes (as opposed to the localized presence of the lower-castes), and the consequent identification of ‘Hindu’ territory with the presence of the Brahmins. In mapping this process, I emphasize the gender and caste dynamics inherent to the construction of this identity, especially in the concretizing of communal lines around the issue of personal laws, and elaborate on the economic, communal and political determinants of this gendered dynamic in the construction of the identity ‘Hindu’. It thus argues that the strongly Brahmanical caste-profile of the anti-colonial nationalist movement indicates the extent to which Brahmanical patriarchy (or masculine hegemony) and its practices came to define the hegemonic understanding of the identity ‘Hindu’ as well as ‘India’ – and continued to do so even after independence. The argument of the thesis is that, unless one takes account of these processes, it is difficult to fully comprehend the depth, scale and reach of Hindu nationalism – as a latent and as an active ideology. Thirdly, I argue the need to factor in another process in the understanding of Hindu nationalism, which also has its roots in the colonial encounter but which gains a different dynamic after independence: the idea and practice of ‘development’. The study proceeds to briefly historicize the idea of development and then to chart the trajectories of its implementation through the Nehruvian emphasis on Planning and state driven social change, and the consequent impact on the changing social, economic and political theatre of the country after independence. It analyses this impact specifically on the gender and caste dynamics of this period, arguing that the Brahmanical hegemony of the pre-independence period begins to transform in the seventies, as it negotiates with and then accommodates the increasing visibility and volubility of lower caste presence in the political domain. Similarly, even as women’s movements successfully moved the state to implement policies that actually empowered women and made possible their greater participation in the public sphere, the gradual and ongoing process of shifting control of the economy from the state to the private sector has ensured that safeguards for women, labor, lower castes and other marginal groups are almost non-existent, or at best, remain arbitrary and at the mercy of the private sector. The study proposes that the processes of liberalization and privatization were thus crucial to the transformation of Brahmanical masculine hegemony, in its strategies to retain hegemonic power. In other words, the study argues that the developmentalist agenda of the post-independence Indian state contributed, in no small measure, to the resurgence of Hindu nationalism on the political stage, from the late seventies and particularly in the eighties, into the present. Finally, the study explores the tensions and relations that obtain between the multiple dichotomies generated in the thesis – the personal and the political, the hegemonic and the hegemonised, upper caste and lower caste, Hindu and non-Hindu, masculine and feminine, modern and traditional, etc. I argue that Hindu nationalist positions should not be understood as manifest only in its organizational and/or institutional manifestations, but in and through this field of beliefs, actions and relations that constitute the masculine hegemony of Brahmanical patriarchy, within and from which Hindu nationalism finds its visceral roots. I close by proposing that unless we take cognizance of this, and look beyond the electoral performances of the Bharatiya Janata Party to the ways in which hegemonies are maintained using the very tools and structures intended to dismantle them we will not truly be able to counter the Hindu right or its masculinist violences.

This is a "ghost story" of sorts, based in India. It has some triggering content, e.g., suicide. There are a few Indian words used, which are: "mali" - gardener; "neem" - the margosa tree; "dhaba" - roadside eatery; "beedi" - the Indian cheroot; "saab" - contraction of the honorific "sahib", or "gentleman"; "gamcha" - a light, all-purpose towel carried by a lot of the peasantry in India; "bhaiya" - "brother", generically used to address men

This book presents an innovative approach to gender, nationalism, and the relations between them, and analyses the broader social base of Hindu nationalist organisation to understand the growth of 'Hindutva', or Hindu nationalism, in India.

Arguing that Hindu nationalist thought and predilections emerge out of, and, in turn, feed, pre-existing gendered tendencies, the author presents the new concept of 'masculine hegemony', specifically Brahmanical masculine hegemony. The book offers a historical overview of the processes that converge in the making of the identity ‘Hindu’, in the making of the religion ‘Hinduism’, and in the shaping of the movement known as ‘Hindutva’. The impact of colonialism, social reform, and caste movements is explored, as is the role of key figures such as Mohandas Gandhi, Indira Gandhi, and Narendra Modi. The book sheds light on the close, yet uneasy, relations that Hindu nationalist thought and practice have with conceptions of 'modernity', 'development' and women's movements, and politics, and the future of Hindu nationalism in India.

A new approach to the study of Hindu nationalism, this book offers a theoretically innovative understanding of Indian history and socio-politics. It will be of interest to academics working in the field of Gender studies and Asian Studies, in particular South Asian history and politics.

Video of online lecture delivered for Mindsperm, of Ashoka University, India. It attempts to discuss the relations between the enforced isolation during the COVID pandemi, incarceration in prison, communication, social media, surveillance and state repression.
The actual lecture starts 10 mins into the video - please feel free to jump straight to that point.