Introduction^11people, political-socialization processes mainly comprise cultural story-
telling, politicians' public speeches, political and religious rallies, policy
promulgations, and the like. This book attempts to investigate the work-
ings of this amalgamation of history, myth, and political socialization,
both manifest and latent.
We seek to analyze the notion of "unity of history" and the Oriental-
ist constructions of cultural domination with the help of postmodernism
without compromising the respect for the struggles of peoples in chal-
lenging these metanarrativizations. After all, the postmodern theory of
history, with its poststructuralist and historicist models, is effective for
such an analysis, but one has to be watchful of this dominant European
movement reabsorbing the postcolonial struggles and experiences into an
international postmodern discourse and subjecting postcoloniality to yet
another metanarrative and display of European/Euro-American power
and control.^19"PRESENTING" THE PAST
As pointed out earlier, one of the chief characteristics of Hindutva pol-
itics is the psychedelic preoccupation with the sanitized Hindu history
and the commitment to make India's singular future look exactly like that
through systematic nowcasting in the present. This "presenting" the past,
turning the past into present (tense), with powerful symbols, effective
communication techniques, and persuasive language is an important phe-
nomenon worth studying. Reading history as ideology (just like Michael
Taussig's reading of it as sorcery), we can identify an intriguing poeticity
between A's "presenting" of the past and B's unconscious "presenting"
of its temporality. This poeticity is one of "appropriateness of meaning
and feeling," and a reading of the powerful images of the past that are
appropriated and actively used in the "presenting" process can explain
the poeticity and their "appropriateness."^20
Sanitizing the multifarious Indians' multisided pasts, desensitizing
them to the hateful Hindutva agenda, and delineating a divisive future
where they can be better controlled, Hindutva groups present the past—
that is, offer it as a gift to the people of India to be taken into the future.
The complex histories of "India" get transmuted into a simple conflict
over a religious building with emotion-laden identity strings attached to
it. The futuristic present is potent and powerful.
The history that the Hindutva forces anxiously script and the ancient
future they envisage for India intersect in the present. Motivated by a big-
oted understanding of the past, it is in the present where attempts are
being made to bring about a similar future. The present becomes the cru-
cial political site where opposing forces compete for prominence. As the
powers that be implement policies and programs to connect the future-