Presenting the Past Anxious History and Ancient Future in Hindutva India

Rambhakts: Defining "Us" and Depicting "Our Story" 39

appropriate the cultural symbolisms and imageries and even the politi-

cal concepts they secretly despise such as Gandhian socialism, Gandhian

Swadeshi, and Gandhi's Ramarajya imagery. Trying to be everything for

everybody simply shows that there are good reasons to worry.

The Hindutva preference for purity and uniformity rather than plural-

ity and unity, bubbling enthusiasm to demonstrate the invented militancy

on a large scale, and the ambivalence in ideology and politics make one

suspicious of the real intentions and worry about its fascist tendencies

and aspirations. The effective communalization and nationalization of the

middle class and even sections of the lower class have helped Hindutva

not just to capture the state power in Delhi but also to ride on the back of

the emerging social forces to entrench their status-quoist agenda and to

take the country backward. As the journey to the medieval period pro-

ceeds, the fringe groups among the Rambhakts tend to fall in line and

the non-Rambhakts run for cover. With increased control over the internal

segments of the Indian society, the fascist Hindutva may turn its atten-

tion to the neighboring countries to re-create the ancient Akhand Bharat

(Greater Hindusthan), and then reach for the outside world to realize their

dream of Hindu imperialism.

This remaking of India as a whole—politically, ideologically, histori-

cally—includes a good deal of unmaking that varies from selective appro-

priation to outright rejection of large parts of India's past and present

histories. The unmaking swings from a bourgeois nostalgia of an impe-

rial and Brahminical past to the dreams of superior violence with nuclear

capability deleteriously touching women, Dalits, minorities, pluralism,

and other such actors and factors of national life.^102 Thus a reactionary

notion of nation and nationalism has emerged and is spreading in India.

The poem that Savarkar wrote to bid farewell to his friends on the eve of

being extradited to India from Britain in 1910 summed up the spirit:

"Shree Ram has crowned his chosen people's brow

With laurels golden green! The evil spirit is cast

Away and chased back to the deep from whence

It first arose! And Lo! She lordly stands,

Our Mother Ind, a beacon light Humanity to guide,

Oh martyred saints and soldiers, do awake!

The battle is won which you fought and fell!!"

Thus work for Mother's glory till God's breath

Be rendered back, the Godly mission done—

A martyr's wreath or victor's crown be won!!^103

Thus the Indian national idea emerged in the European context and
replaced multiple identities with an identitarian absolute. While the secu-
lar versions saw the nation as an "object of ultimate concern," Hindu