Mainstreaming Hindutva: Rightwing Anticolonialism and The New Civilizational Project

This paper discusses the project of civilizational power in contemporary India, what I call the new civilizational project (NCP), that is advanced by Hindu nationalists in their effort to mainstream Hindu nationalist ideology (Hindutva). I am specifically interested in the anticolonial material infrastructures of the NCP—how anti-colonial legacies shape and drive the new civilizational project, and the politics of a rightwing postcolonialism that is ascendant both in India and elsewhere in the world today.

In relation to the colloquium theme, my paper advocates for a normative disorientation of the archive of materiality. I show that the story of Hindutva in India does not unfold in a space of exception, but in the normal field of postcolonial sovereignty. To study Hindutva and other examples of majoritarian political formations and authoritarian populisms, we must engage the field of democratic “politics as usual” as well.

Srirupa Roy is professor and chair of State and Democracy at the Centre for Modern Indian Studies (CeMIS), University of Göttingen, and a founding co-director of ICAS:MP, the Merian-Tagore International Centre for Advanced Studies "Metamorphoses of the Political." (ICAS:MP). Her books include The Political Outsider: Indian Democracy and the Lineages of Populism (Stanford University Press, 2024); Saffron Republic: Hindu Nationalism and State Power in India (with Thomas Blom Hansen, Cambridge University Press, 2022); Visualizing Secularism and Religion: Egypt, Lebanon, Turkey, India (with Alev Çinar and Maha Yahya, (University of Michigan Press, 2012); Beyond Belief: India and the Politics of Postcolonial Nationalism (Duke University Press, 2007), and Violence and Democracy in India (with Amrita Basu, Seagull Books, 2006). Her current research is on New Civilizationalism and the Mainstreaming of National Populisms.

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