Prof. Angana Chatterji's study of the communal situation in India stands apart from the existing literature on the subject, both in terms of empirical details and analytical rigour. The extensive fieldwork she has undertaken in Orissa exposes the inhuman and brutal interventions of Hindu communalism and its possible implications for the future. This is by far the most outstanding work on the subject. - K.N. Panikkar
description
This book is an erudite and elegiac exploration of Hindu nationalism in India today. It offers a revealing account of Hindu militant mobilizations as an authoritarian movement manifest throughout culture, polity, and economy, religion and law, class and caste, on gender, body, land, and memory. 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.
about the author
ANGANA P. CHATTERJI is professor of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco. Her work spans issues of cultural survival, nation/nationalisms, gendered violence, and postcolonial critique. Her recent writings include two forthcoming books, Land and Justice: The Struggle for Cultural Survival, and a co-edited volume, Contesting Nation: Gendered Violence in South Asia; Notes on the Postcolonial Present.
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