Book Description

The assertion that even institutions often viewed as abhorrent should be dispassionately understood motivates Arkotong Longkumer's pathbreaking ethnography of the Sangh Parivar, a family of organizations comprising the Hindu right. The Greater India Experiment counters the urge to explain away their ideas and actions as inconsequential by demonstrating their efforts to influence local politics and culture in Northeast India. Longkumer constructs a comprehensive understanding of Hindutva, an idea central to the establishment of a Hindu nation-state, by focusing on the Sangh Parivar's engagement with indigenous peoples in a region that has long resisted the "idea of India." Contextualizing their activities as a Hindutva "experiment" within the broader Indian political and cultural landscape, he ultimately paints a unique picture of the country today.

Author Brief

Arkotong Longkumer

Arkotong Longkumer is Senior Lecturer in Modern Asia at the University of Edinburgh, and Senior Research Fellow at the Kohima Institute, Nagaland. His research and teaching interests lie in the intersection between indigenous religions, Hinduism and local Christianities in South and Southeast Asia. Longkumer is also interested in theory and method in the study of religions, and its interface between the different disciplines of religious studies, anthropology, and history. He is the co-author of Indigenous Religion(s): Local Grounds, Global Networks (2020), and co-editor of Neo-Hindutva (2019).

Chair

Dr Kriti Kapila

Dr Kriti Kapila is a social anthropologist whose research focuses on the work of law in contemporary India, including in the anthropology of law, genetics and genomics. She is the Academic Director for the International School for Government and has extensive experience in running cutting-edge professional development and executive education programmes. Kriti is currently co-director the Chevening Financial Services Leadership Programme.

Kriti's research is concerned with the regimes of evidence around the cultural difference in India in three distinct but interrelated contexts. This research examines the politics of recognition in India with a particular focus on the overlaps and disjuncture between official, popular and academic understandings of the category ‘tribe’ in contemporary India. It further compares two large-scale mapping exercises that have the culture-concept at their heart, currently underway in India.

She is currently completing a manuscript entitled, 'Domestic modern: Law, intimacy and citizenship in North India'. The book is an anthropological study of the place of law in everyday domestic life in colonial and contemporary India.

Discussant

Uday Chandra

Uday Chandra is an assistant professor of government in the School of Foreign Service and a member of the India Initiative Faculty Advisory Committee. He is based at Georgetown University in Qatar. Uday's research lies at the intersection between critical agrarian studies, political anthropology, postcolonial theory, and South Asian studies. He is interested in state-society relations, power and resistance, political violence, agrarian change, rural-urban migration, popular religion, and the philosophy of the social sciences.