Page 271 - Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere

of religion under capitalist modernity, this discourse of religion in India is
grounded on vague notions of “culture” understood as sanskriti, rather than
through some foundational texts. This polyvalence that structures religious dis-
course allows religious nationalism a ®uid modality that can happily engage in
the most pronounced consumerist practices of Western-led globalization with-
out feeling in the least dissipated by “materialism” which was anathema to
Nehruvian socialism. This development is, of course, partly to be understood
as a consequence of the very impossibility of granting “Hinduism” some kind
of objecthood as a ¤rm, unitary, and historical thing. It has also to do with the
speci¤c political strategies and electoral bases through which it came to domi-
nate the Indian political scene since the late 1980s.

The Sacred Market and the Profane Temple:
Descartes as Guru

After the debacle of Indira Gandhi’s corruption-ridden reign, and her
son’s inept attempts at “modernizing” the nation-state, the precipitous eco-
nomic crises in the country in the late 1980s coincided with the emergence of
the Hindu rightists’ Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) as a powerful player on the
national scene (Hansen 1998, 291–314). It is crucial to remember that the BJP
has traditionally been a party against state involvement in the economy, spoken
consistently in the name of “the people” as opposed to the Congress—an under-
taking of constructing the people in a pedagogic project—and has shifted its
strategies of political mobilization depending on particular conjunctures. The
dominant social groups within the Hindu Right (itself a deeply fragmented but
nevertheless powerful social bloc) have thus been in favor of greater involve-
ment in the global economy, have come from positions of relative power in
terms of disposable incomes, and have often couched their political rhetoric in
terms of their “Hinduness” (Hindutva).
The chief ideologue of the Hindu Right, Deendayal Upadhyaya, always main-
tained that the core of Hindutva and the nation lay in its “Chiti” or soul, which
must remain unchanged whatever the shifts in culture (sanskriti), since the lat-
ter must not deviate from the former (Upadhyaya 1992 [1962]). This wonder-
fully elastic philosophical duality has consistently grounded the Hindu Right’s
“constructive engagement” with metropolitan capital and global TV while still
claiming an increasingly masculinist and aggressive religious nationalism. In the
context of its integration into the BJP’s economic platform in their document
“Humanistic Approach to Economic Development,” the relationship between
discourses of cultural purity and global capitalism have important implica-
tions for notions of cultural homogenization. In this case, discourses of the
“nature” of a nation’s “ethos” can be characterized as expressions of cultural
autonomy, particularly since they are framed in opposition to the “Western” dis-
courses of secularism and “socialism” that the supposed elites of the country
have propounded. Thus Hindutva claims an embattled position in relation to

260 Sudeep Dasgupta