Television and Temples: Hindutva and OBC and Adivasi Self-Making in Borderland Gujarat

Abstract

This paper describes how Kolis—who are an OBC—and Adivasis in Gujarat negotiate and are constituted by militant Hinduism. Once the anchor of a secular political coalition, the political personhood of Kolis has shifted since 2014. The television complex and temple-building activities of Hindu chauvinism create a context in which identification with Brahmanical Hinduism, a vegetarian normativity, and distancing from Muslims transpires. However, the Hindutva-identifying subjectivity is fractured. Adivasi self-making resists temple cultures and caste Hinduism and asserts non-vegetarianism. Some Kolis’ affective relationalities with Bhakti saints and critiques of temple-going suggest that oppositional potentialities to Brahmanical Hinduism are always present.

Keywords:

• Caste
• farmer
• Hindu nationalism
• Kabir
• Kabirpanth
• Koli
• rural
• tribe
• vegetarianism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. See Ipsita Chatterjee, ‘Globalization and the Production of Difference: A Case Study of the Neoliberal Production of Hindu Nationalism in India’, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 30, no. 3 (2010): 621–32.

2. Aravind Rajagopal, Politics after Television: Hindu Nationalism and the Reshaping of the Public in India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001): 1.

3. Rajagopal, Politics, 3–4.

4. Rajagopal, Politics, 6.

5. Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996): 8.

6. Deepa Reddy and John Zavos, ‘Temple Publics: Religious Institutions and the Construction of Contemporary Hindu Communities’, International Journal of Hindu Studies 13, no. 3 (2009): 241–60; 242.

7. Sitara Thobani, ‘Mapping Hindutva’s Coordinates: Global Formations of Nationalist Space’, Social Identities 29, no. 2 (2023): 220–36; 223.

8. Rajagopal, Politics, 1.

9. Ghanshyam Shah, ‘The BJP and Backward Castes in Gujarat’, in Caste and Democratic Politics in India, ed. Ghanshyam Shah (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2002): 295–314.

10. Dolly Daftary, ‘Watershed Development and Neoliberalism in India’s Drylands’, Journal of International Development 26, no. 7 (2014): 999–1010.

11. Approved by the Institutional Review Board at Washington University in St. Louis, HRPO# X06-33.

12. Anirudh Krishna, Active Social Capital: Tracing the Roots of Development and Democracy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002).

13. Dolly Daftary, ‘Elected Leaders, Community and Development: Evidence on Distribution and Agency from a Case in India’, Journal of Development Studies 46, no. 10 (2010): 1692–707.

14. Kalyanakrishnan Sivaramakrishnan, ‘Forests, Politics and Governance in Bengal, India, 1794–1994’ (unpublished PhD thesis, Yale University, 1996).

15. Appadurai, Modernity, 55.

16. Rajagopal, Politics, 1.

17. See, for example, Alishan Jafri, Shehlat Maknoon Wani and Siddharth Varadarajan, ‘Just before Delhi Riots, Militant Hindutva Leader Called Repeatedly for Muslims to Be Killed’, The Wire, 2021, accessed June 2, 2023, https://thewire.in/communalism/delhi-riots-conspiracy-anti-muslim-cleric-yatinarsinghanand; The Wire Staff, ‘Hindutva Leaders at Haridwar Event Call for Muslim Genocide’, The Wire, December 22, 2021, accessed June 6, 2023, https://thewire.in/communalism/hindutva-leaders-dharma-sansad-muslim-genocide.

18. Purnima Mankekar, ‘Epic Contests: Television and Religious Identity in India’, in Media Worlds: Anthropology on New Terrain, ed. Faye Ginsburg, Lila Abu-Lughod and Brian Larkin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002): 134–51; 134.

19. Rajagopal, Politics, 3.

20. Appadurai, Modernity, 8.

21. Rajagopal, Politics, 4.

22. Ibid., 5.

23. Marshal McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1961), quoted in Aravind Rajagopal, Politics after Television: Hindu Nationalism and the Reshaping of the Public in India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001): 5.

24. Rajagopal, Politics, 5.

25. Ibid., 6.

26. Maribel Elliet Alvarado Becerril, ‘Screening Hindutva’, in Nation, Nationalism and the Public Sphere: Religious Politics in India, ed. Avishek Ray and Ishita Banerjee-Dube (New Delhi: Sage, 2020): 214–38.

27. Rajagopal, Politics, 1.

28. Ibid., 3.

29. Ibid., 2.

30. Sanjay Srivastava, ‘Urban Spaces, Disney-Divinity and Moral Middle Classes in Delhi’, Economic & Political Weekly 44, nos. 26/27 (2009): 338–45; 341–42.

31. Thobani, ‘Mapping’, 222.

32. Ibid.

33. Ibid., 225.

34. Derek Hook, ‘Monumental Space and the Uncanny’, Geoforum 36, no. 6 (2005): 688–704; 693.

35. Edward Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (London and New York: Verso, 1989); Edward Soja, Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places (Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1996).

36. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1974): 224.

37. Ibid., 143.

38. Ibid., 143.

39. Thobani, ‘Mapping’, 225.

40. Arjun Appadurai, ‘Global Ethnoscapes: Notes and Queries for a Transnational Anthropology’, in Recapturing Anthropology: Working in the Present, ed. Richard G. Fox (Santa Fe, NM: School of Advanced Research Press, 1991): 191–220.

41. Bhrigupati Singh, Poverty and the Quest for Life: Spiritual and Material Striving in Rural India (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2015).

42. Al Jazeera, ‘India to Hold Nationwide “Cow Science” Exam’, Al Jazeera, January 7, 2021, accessed June 9, 2023, https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/1/7/india-to-hold-nationwide-cow-scienceexam:; Utpal Parashar, ‘Assam Approves Bill to Regulate Cattle Slaughter, Transport, Sale of Beef’, Hindustan Times, August 14, 2021, accessed June 9, 2023, https://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/assam-approves-bill-to-regulate-cattle-slaughter-transport-sale-of-beef-101628878435918.html:.

43. See, for instance, Al Jazeera, ‘Indian City to Remove Non-Vegetarian Food Stalls from Main Roads’, Al Jazeera, November 16, 2021, accessed June 9, 2023, https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/11/16/gujarat-ahmedabad-non-vegetarian-food-stalls:; Adil Bhat, ‘India’s “Vegetarian Nationalism” Targets Meat Eaters’, Deutsche Welle, April 6, 2021, accessed June 9, 2023, https://www.dw.com/en/india-vegetarian-nationalist-hindu-fundamentalists-wage-campaign-against-butchers/a-65249032.

44. Wendy Doniger, The Hindus: An Alternative History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).

45. See Shakuntala Banaji, ‘Vigilante Publics: Orientalism, Modernity and Hindutva Fascism in India’, Javnost—The Public: Journal of the European Institute for Communication and Culture 25, no. 4 (2018): 333–50; Parvis Ghassem-Fachandi, Pogrom in Gujarat: Hindu Nationalism and Anti-Muslim Violence in India (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012).

46. See Sikata Banerjee, ‘Armed Masculinity, Hindu Nationalism and Female Political Participation in India: Heroic Mothers, Chaste Wives and Celibate Warriors’, International Feminist Journal of Politics 8, no. 1 (2006): 62–83.

47. For a case study, see O.B. Roopesh, ‘Educating “Temple Cultures”: Heterogeneous Worship and Hindutva Politics in Kerala’, Sociological Bulletin 70, no. 4 (2021): 485–501.

48. Srivastava, ‘Urban Spaces’, 341–42.

49. Ibid., 341.

50. Yamini Narayanan, ‘“Cow Is a Mother, Mothers Can Do Anything for Their Children!” Gaushalas as Landscapes of Anthropatriarchy and Hindu Patriarchy’, Hypatia 34, no. 2 (2020): 195–221.

51. Pralay Kanungo and Satyakam Joshi, ‘Carving out a White Marble Deity from a Rugged Black Stone? Hindutva Rehabilitates Ramayan’s Shabari in a Temple’, International Journal of Hindu Studies 13, no. 3 (2009): 279–99.

52. Shah, ‘BJP and Backward Castes’, 295–314.